It’s good to see comics trying to do something with their power. One such is Salma Hindy. Steven Zhou interviews Salma Hindy for The Globe and Mail (7/28/2017), and talks about her strategies.
Her intent
Hindy’s friend, Selma Samy Akel, lays it out:
She’s helping humanize Muslims and comedy does that better than anything else, I think.
Hindy herself echoes this sentiment:
I feel like there’s nothing better than comedy to challenge people, because you can try to yell and scream, but it’s really much easier and more effective to just make them laugh.
While she references that “making them laugh” line that characterizes her audience as objects to be acted upon, Hindy’s comments remind us of another point that often is made: humor’s ability to cut through the clutter, to be heard [more on this in the works].
Her jokes
Hindy’s jokes often revolve around the social absurdities she deals with as a “Muslim woman in a politically charged time.” As Zhou notes,
She often makes fun of the “docile Middle Eastern woman” stereotype by making sarcastic reference to not being allowed to drive – an obvious reference to Saudi Arabia, where women can’t obtain a licence. Or she’ll mock the “Islamic terrorist” cliché by complaining that she never got the memo to attend any of the terrorists’ planning meetings, despite sharing the same religion with them.
“Am I not good enough for my own people or something?” she says, exasperated.
She drew loud laughs from the crowd with a story about tripping over some stairs one morning as she rushed to catch the GO train to work. When she got up from her fall and limped to the entrance, she noticed expressions of exaggerated horror on the faces of her fellow commuters.
“They obviously thought I looked like some victimized Muslim woman who sustained an injury from a husband or something,” she joked. “This is when I realized that, guys, being injured is clearly white privilege!
“Like, when other women sprain their ankles it’s an accident, but when it happens to me it gets attributed to the men in my family? C’mon!”
Such jokes tell a story of experience. To the extent that they’re relatable, it humanizes her and by extension, all Muslims like her. This is a bit straight out of Caty Borum Chattoo’s playbook [The Laughter Effect; working on getting a summary of the relevant bits up].
