Did I say Muslims? I meant comedians. Comedians who also happen to be Muslim. They also have a Kickstarter campaign for a feature documentary film they’re making called The Muslims Are Coming. Though they plan on coming to a movie theater near you sometime this year, hopefully before the election, they have already taken their comedy to some interesting places. As part of the filming process, the directors Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah, along with fellow comedians of “threatening” descent, took a comedy tour by the same name on the road, hitting up all the hot spots along the southern Bible-Belt, and into such immigrant-friendly states as Arizona.
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Last year, Comedy Tourism checked in with the red-hot stand-up comedy scene of South Africa. Three years earlier in 2008, then-film student David Paul Meyer traveled to South Africa in search of a thesis topic and found a subject who would turn his school project into a full feature documentary. Meyer’s film You Laugh But It’s True, formerly titled Township to the Stage, profiles the early rise of South African comedian Trevor Noah, as he prepares for his first ever one-man show “The Daywalker.”
Meyer completed post-production on the film last year and just recently secured an international distribution deal with First Hand Films. In [...]
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When cultures collide, hilarity often ensues. So too, often, do one-dimensional stereotypes. Speaking of often, it is with a similar frequency that I use this Comedy Tourism series to explore intercultural communication through humor — to try and understand laughter from the angle of others. But it’s also a popular choice in comedy to turn that which makes us different into the joke itself.
This culture clash trope is a pretty old entry in the joke book, but not necessarily antiquated. Most people know what it [...]
Americans may be familiar with Peru as home to the breathtaking Machu Picchu, or perhaps as a bordering nation to Lake Titicaca. But, the Republic of Peru is also home to 29.4 million people (UN, 2010), rich natural resources like copper, silver, lead, zinc, oil and gold (BBC 2011) and a small but fruitful world of comedy in its capital city of Lima.
A friend connected me with an aspiring comedian in Lima named Charly Cervera. To start, he described to me the current comedic climate in Peru.
Comedy in Peru is a small world; it’s only really practiced in the capital as stage comedy…In the provinces, comedy [...]
Geographically, Finland is sandwiched between two countries that could not be more different. Its neighbor to the left Sweden took first dibs on the country during the great Northern Crusades of the 12th century. Once its right side neighbor Russia caught the conquering bug in the 18th century, it was only a matter of time before Finland became a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire. Despite winning its independence in the famed 1920 Treaty of Tartu, Finland would remain nothing more than a poor second to Belgium. That is of course if you take your history lessons from Monty Python — and why wouldn’t you? I whole-heartedly believe [...]
