Racializing Islam through Humor

Abstract

When is a comedian who happens to be Muslim thought of as a “Muslim comedian”? The rise of American Muslim comedy across US pop culture suggests an appetite for Muslim performers and stories in the name of diversity and inclusion. But why have those stories been concentrated and lauded specifically in the world of stand-up comedy? Considering global events like the Danish cartoon controversy and the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the public demonstration of humor and levity operates as a mode of secular communication among Euro-American state subjects. When the subject is Muslim, however, demonstrating such humor and the ability to “take a joke” has consequences for their broader social inclusion across secular systems. Scholarship on humor often anticipates its rarity among religious practitioners and Muslims in particular. While some scholars conceptualize Muslim comedy as a form of ethnic or racial performance, others affirm an authentic, original Islamic “archive” of humor. Still other studies write about humor as a dissident performance against autocratic Muslim strongmen. Taken together, Islam is depicted as severe and routinized in its practice, while humor is a natural corrective to the danger it poses within the secular modern. US comedians such as Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, and Hasan Minhaj have cultivated legible Muslim identities through the language and hostile implications of racialization. These staged Muslims uphold secular ideals like “diversity” by taming comportments that otherwise affiliate them with Islam outside the boundaries of mere bodily difference. Thus, it is when Islam operates within the confines of a racial category that it finds social legibility in broader American cultural spaces.