I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV (16 page)

Manager, now cocky: “You will have a whole bottle!”

“No, no,” I said, worried. “I don't need a whole bottle.”

“This is Lebanon. You're getting a whole bottle!”

And so a bottle of Don Julio was designated as my personal bottle for the evening and brought to me in the manager's office, where I was feeling fairly smug about things. Eat that, Bill Cosby.

Now, I don't like being drunk onstage. If I ever drink during a show, it's usually one glass that I will sip during my set. But this was Lebanon and I was telling jokes on top of a bar, so things worked differently. I went onstage . . . I mean I went on a bar with my glass of Don Julio, leaving the bottle behind. At a certain point I decided to riff on a joke about how hard it is to travel being a Middle Easterner and asked a guy in the audience his name. I was expecting Ahmed or Mohammad or Ali—something I could work with. Instead the guy had the most common name ever.

“Joseph.”

“Joseph? As in Joey?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is that a made-up name?”

“No. It is my given name.”

“Oh, okay. Then your friend there, what's his name?”

“Anthony.”

“As in Tony?”

“Yes.”

“And the guy next to him?”

“Vincent.”

“As in Vinny? What are you guys, the Sopranos?”

“No,” he said without a hint of a smile. “We're Christian.”

Buying time, I reached for the tequila and took a sip. I hadn't noticed, but I had worked my way to the bottom of the glass as I struggled to turn the joke. Soon enough, a waiter showed up
with another glass. I think the manager saw that I was struggling a bit and decided to send me more inspiration. Besides, this was Lebanon, and it
was
my bottle for the night; he wanted to make sure I finished it.

There I was with two double glasses of Don Julio warming my belly, standing on a bar in Beirut, trying to figure out my next move when I noticed a group of women in the corner laughing, talking, and completely ignoring me as if I weren't standing on a bar with microphone in hand.

“Excuse me, ladies. What's going on here?”

They were screaming and yelling. “Bachelorette party!” one of them shouted, indicating I should stop bothering them.

“Bachelorette party? We have a stand-up comedy show going on.”

More hollering. “Whatever, dude.”

“No, ladies, this is an advertised show. These hundred and fifty people staring up at the bar have paid to see me perform. You have to keep it down.”

“Woo-hoo!” they hollered. “Keep it down!”

“No, you're not supposed to yell ‘Woo-hoo, keep it down' at me. I'm telling
you
to keep it down.”

More screaming and shouting, and I'm on the verge of losing control.

“Why is the bachelorette wearing a penis balloon on her head? This poor girl is getting married. She's got many years of humiliation ahead of her. Don't make her wear the penis balloon.”

“Penis balloon!” they hollered. It was clear they did not understand why I was standing on the bar. Everything I said, they repeated. They thought I was leading them in cheers instead of performing stand-up.

Another sip of tequila. A new glass arrived.

To recap: For a comedian who does Middle Eastern jokes, names like Joey, Tony, and Vinny can really throw you for a loop. Add to that the fact that you're performing on a bar, sipping your third glass of a double tequila, and engaging in call and response with a bachelorette party, and it can cause real confusion. Was I in Beirut or Las Vegas?

Making things worse, a man who was the chaperone for the bachelorette party approached the stage—which, have I mentioned, was just a bar?—and asked me in broken English when I was going to be finished telling my stories. It seemed the women were getting restless and had heard enough of me babbling into a microphone. They wanted dance music to get the party started. He actually interrupted me midjoke as 150 people were watching my set.

“You. When you finish?”

“Excuse me?”

“When you stop?”

I checked my watch. “I've got another half hour. This is a comedy show. They paid me to perform tonight.”

Obviously a professional in his chosen field, he was prepared to work through such trivial roadblocks. “You sing?”

“Do I sing?”

“When you do some songs?”

“I'm not singing. Me do comedy. Ha-ha. Jokey joke.”

“Not funny.”

“You barely speak English. How do you know I'm not funny?”

“I know. You not funny.”

Great, half loaded on tequila in front of a less than ordinary crowd, I run into the Lebanese Simon Cowell. “So you're a judge of comedy in a language you don't even speak?” I asked. “Go over
there and sit down next to the girl with the penis balloon on her head so I can finish my show.”

At this point he didn't look too happy with me. I'm not sure if he understood what I was saying, but he seemed upset. He was holding a small bowl of cashews and popping them into his mouth, just crunching the nuts slowly and staring at me. I didn't know if he was going to pull out a gun and shoot me or if he was blitzed out of his head even more than I was.

Trying to lighten the mood, I asked, “What're you eating?”

“Nuts.”

“Throw me one.”

He reached into the bowl and tossed a cashew in my direction. I was at least five feet above him and the cashew sailed high overhead in what seemed like slow motion. This was risky; in fact, it was the tequila talking. If it had hit me in the eye, or I had somehow reached for it and lost my balance, I would have ended up looking like an idiot. Even worse, I could've fallen off the bar and ended up in a Lebanese hospital. But I kept my composure and somehow snapped the nut out of thin air with my mouth—like a seal at the circus. The audience was impressed: a roaring round of applause. And the chaperone, head hung in defeat, waddled back to the bachelorettes. Bill Cosby NEVER did that!

Making Hezbollah Laugh

I was being exposed to all the different religions and people of the country and at some point someone thought it would be a good idea for me and the Axis of Evil comedians to set up a meeting with Hezbollah leadership and film it. We were in the middle of a five-country tour and had been filming the whole thing to come
out with a “behind the scenes” documentary that we would air on Showtime Arabia, a cable network that showed Western programs. Our meeting with Hezbollah would be part of this new format. I guess having three Middle Eastern–American comedians meet with Hezbollah would make good television, right? What nobody thought about was the fact that the United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization and would probably not encourage three of its citizens to set up a meeting and film it—even if we were comedians. I can imagine the State Department representative discouraging us.

“Hezbollah is a terrorist organization.”

“Yeah, but we're comics, so it's cool.”

“They are a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.”

“We just want to talk to them. Maybe tell a few jokes.”

“THEY ARE TERRORISTS! THEY WILL KIDNAP YOU!”

“We understand that, but do you think they will laugh at our jokes? Kidnappers have to laugh too, right?”

The person making the introductions told us that our “fixer” would meet us in the parking lot of a grocery store to take us to the meeting with Hezbollah. Anytime you hear the word “fixer” in the Middle East, there is cause to be nervous. In Los Angeles, where I live, a fixer is someone who comes to your house and fixes the washing machine. In foreign countries, a fixer is a guy who is connected and can get you into seedy situations. As we waited for our fixer, I had a feeling he wouldn't be showing up with a tool belt.

The other comedians and I were waiting in two cars in a grocery store parking lot; the fixer was running late. The more we waited, the more nervous I became. I kept thinking of the opening scene of
The Insider
with Russell Crowe, in which the Al
Pacino character sets up a meeting with Hezbollah and they throw a burlap sack over his head and rush him to the rendezvous with guns drawn. I felt like we were about to be given the same burlap sack treatment. I told one of the Axis comics that this is how every bad kidnapping movie begins—with the victims waiting in a parking lot, in the back of a van, to meet the bad guys. What had seemed like an interesting idea when we were first presented with it was beginning to feel like a really, really bad idea. Also, it was a sunny day. The last thing I wanted was to not be able to enjoy the great weather because I had a burlap sack over my head.

Eventually our Hezbollah fixer showed up and he wasn't what I expected at all. I was expecting a guy in Fidel Castro military fatigues, maybe with a couple of sidekicks carrying Kalashnikovs. Or maybe a guy in a full Muslim dishdasha with some prayer beads in his hands. You know . . . the outfit. Instead, our guy looked like an employee right out of Ed Hardy—designer jeans, T-shirt, gelled hair, even a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He told us to follow him to Hezbollah territory where we would meet the “main guy.”

The only thing worse than the fixer in these situations is the main guy. The van I was in followed the fixer's car; one of the guys from our team who was an Algerian Shiite rode with the fixer. The closer we got to Hezbollah territory the more our driver, who was a Christian Lebanese, kept complaining in broken English. “This no good. This no good.” It's never a good thing when a local is telling you that he's getting nervous. It would be the equivalent of me driving some guests around Los Angeles and once we got to a bad strip mall, just completely freaking out: “This is the worst stretch of shopping in California! There are just no good restaurants for miles! We could starve and die. Or eat something full of saturated fat!” You're the local. You're supposed to keep
your cool. But our driver wasn't holding back. Even when he spoke Arabic, which we didn't understand, we could make out that he was nervous.

“
Blakha blakha blakha
BURLAP SACK
blakha blakha blakha
HOSTAGE!”

Meanwhile, ahead in the fixer's car, our Algerian friend quickly figured out that the fixer was also a drug dealer, reaching this conclusion when the fixer offered to sell us drugs. I think the fixer did not completely understand who the hell we were. He'd just heard “Americans” and thought we'd probably want to buy some drugs from him. Or maybe he heard “comedians” and thought we would want to buy some drugs from him. Either way, he had drugs and was offering to sell us some.

I've come to learn that our fears of people in other parts of the world are usually a bit overblown. The real thing that most of our “enemies” want is simply to have some of our money taking up space inside their pockets. I remember when the “War on Terror” originally began and the military was looking for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan. There was a newspaper article about how the U.S. military had given a satellite phone to a warlord and told him that if he saw bin Laden he should use the phone to call the military. The warlord had agreed, and no sooner had the U.S. military packed up their Humvees than the warlord set up a phone system where his tribesmen could use the satellite phone to call their families in other countries and he would charge them to use the phone. The U.S. military had thought this guy was interested in catching bin Laden like they were, when he was just interested in setting up a for-profit long distance phone service. We wanted justice, he wanted to be AT&T.

So let's recap: I, a born Shiite Muslim who's not really religious, am in one car with Aron Kader, one of the Axis
comedians whose father is Palestinian and mother is Mormon. We are being driven by a paranoid Lebanese Christian who thinks we're going to get kidnapped. Another Axis comedian, Ahmed Ahmed, who is Egyptian and Sunni Muslim, is in a second car with another Christian Lebanese driver who's freaking out as well. A third car has our Algerian Shiite Muslim friend with a Hezbollah fixer who's trying to sell him some hash. There's a country of Jews just an hour away and a warlord in Afghanistan selling airtime. Meanwhile, somewhere there's a State Department guy who thinks we listened to him. “Good thing they took my advice and didn't go to meet up with Hezbollah. If they had they would be in grave danger at this very moment. By my estimates they would have had their hands cut off by now and be watching as they were fed to goats.” All caught up?

Aron Kader and I were beyond nervous in our car. In the other car our Algerian friend was making excuses to get us out of the potential drug deal, as we got closer and closer to our meeting spot in the heart of Hezbollah territory. We were in a busy neighborhood with shops and families walking around as dusk arrived. There was probably no real reason to be afraid, but the buildup, combined with our nervous driver, had us completely paranoid. The fixer told us he was going to take us into some building where we would meet our guy. That's when our Algerian friend called the whole thing off. He told the fixer that we were running late for our show that night and that we would try to set up another meeting on another day. Don't call us, we'll call you.

As we all sped away in our van, our Algerian friend, who was now riding with us, told us why he had gotten nervous—he started thinking that the guy we were meeting might have been more of a low level criminal than a member of Hezbollah's political
party. He didn't want us to go to this meeting and end up getting kidnapped not for political reasons, but for a ransom. So our meeting with Hezbollah was called off. Part of me was relieved, but part of me was bummed. We were on the verge of telling Hezbollah some jokes. We were going to make them laugh. We were going to make it on Hezbollah's Top 10 Comics to Watch list. We were going to bring peace to the Middle East. At the least, that must be worth a development deal for your own TV show:
Hezbollafeld
.