The Muslims are Coming!

Above, a trailer for a comedy film project for which there's now a Kickstarter fundraising campaign. I LOL'd; I'll be kicking in a few bucks. Description:

A group of Muslim-American standup comedians go on the road counter Islamophobia using the only weapon they have: jokes. The Muslims Are Coming! follows these comics as they visit big cities, rural villages, and everything in between to do shows, meet locals, and counter the haters. Commentary from pop culture icons like the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Janeane Garofalo, CNN's Soledad O'Brien, David Cross, and Lewis Black pepper the film as the comedians travel through middle America. Will audiences laugh? Will they make a difference? Will they make it back? Rest assured, you've never laughed this hard at a Muslim!

(via Jillian York)

• [Dan Hibiki]

  I don’t think Fox News gives a crap about how funny/normal your ethnic minority is.

  • [Cowicide]

    This isn’t for the hopelessly lost, fully indoctrinated minds… they are brainwashed and will probably be so until they die.

    This is for those who at least still have some semblance of critical thinking left in their skulls and may still be sitting on the fence.

• [vertigo25]

  Well, it looks like the comment I was replying to got axed, which is kind of sad because I don’t think he was being at all bigoted. I hope mine doesn’t as well.

  So this may seem a little out of context but here’s my reply in full:

  I have to agree, especially with your statement of this being like the Christian friendly-face campaigns. I am not (and I suspect you are not) anti-muslim, so much as anti-the-bullshit-religion-seems-to-always-bring.

  Now… had this been “The Arabs are coming” I wouldn’t even be commenting. And granted, I think a considerable portion of middle America has no idea what the difference between being Arab and being Muslim is. And, I know that the vast majority of Muslims really are against violence, terrorism, and extremism (or at least the vast majority of Muslims I interact with on a daily basis).

  Having said all that, I’ll definitely see this, and I think what they’re doing is great. I think even just attempting to make Middle America challenge many of their notions is a noble endeavor.

  • [desperado]

    Yeah.  I should probably have avoided the comparative aside, as it was not related to the topic above.

    Cest la vida.  I’ll see if I can find a Muslim to answer me, elsewhere.

• [George Goodall]

  Interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays against something like the CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie ( http://www.cbc.ca/littlemosque/index.php ). 

• [philllies]

  What vertigo25 done said:  we’un “middle mericans” don’t know the wut fer tween dem mooSlems,  ay-rabs, en such. Ga-hilk end yuk…..ggg a-hilk. 

  • [vertigo25]

    “a considerable portion of middle America”

• [soodonim]

  Nothing’s funnier than comedy routines that teach a lesson.

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    You must detest Lenny Bruce. And George Carlin. And Margaret Cho. And Chris Rock. Joan Rivers seems safe.

    • [soodonim]

      I prefer the “No hugging, no learning” school. YMMV.

      I’d much rather watch “Susie Greene” yell at Larry David than, say, Bill Maher take easy shots at religious hicks for an hour and a half. If you like your humor with a dose of life lessons, with earnest interjections from Rachel Maddow and Soledad O’Brien, The Muslims Are Coming looks like a laff riot.

    • [SoItBegins]

      Oh, come on. George Carlin teaches all sorts of neat lessons. I learned seven words from him that I didn’t know before.

• [Drabula]

  Being a life-long atheist-physicalist I’ve never been much concerned with “accepting” any doctrinaire, organized religion. For me it’s always been about accepting (or rejecting) individuals on their own merits.

   I think there is a fundamentalist streak in the human genome that defies borders or religions. Occasionally I wish things could be a bit more black and white but I am burdened with the knowledge of all the shitty things America has done in the Middle East. I don’t look forward to the spread of Islam even as I understand why many of them are quite angry with the West.Fortunately for me, in my latter years I sense I have run my course with physicalism and am now happily ascending the ladder into metaphysical nonsense. As such, I welcome any sort of comedy, especially one that skewers middle America and all it’s piss-my-pants fear.

  • [EH]

     I think there is a fundamentalist streak in the human genome that defies borders or religions

    It’s called “a desire to be led.”

• [Tarliman]

  The Tsilagi taught me that if you can laugh at a thing, it has no power over you. I wish these comedians all the best. 

• [koko szanel]

  This is clearly what world needs – more religious propaganda.

  • [Cowicide]

    I didn’t see it that way and I can’t stand organized religion.

  • [joeposts]

    Can we not at least pretend to like each other, regardless of ethnic or religious backgrounds? ;-)

  • [travtastic]

     So for you to consider this propaganda, doesn’t that mean that you think that Muslims really are violent terrorists?

• [Keith Tyler]

  This reminds me of Albert Brooks’ film “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” which was accompanied by the all-Muslim comedy tour “Allah Made Me Funny.”

  Also Negin Farsad previously made Nerdcore Uprising, a doc mainly about MC Frontalot.

• [rtresco]

  Kill ‘em with kindness, as they say.

• [Rusty Shackleford]

  As a white person, I must say this is a poorly timed project. It’s an election year, so this year we’re hating black people. And at the January meeting, we decided on hating Latinos next year during the immigration debates. So we’re not even going to have time on the schedule for Muslims until 2014 (and that’s an off-year election season, so we might go with gays again). We’re skipping east Asians for the 28th time in a row because they all know kung fu.

  • [travtastic]

     No one ever sends out the updated minutes anymore.

    • [rtresco]

      It’s because everyone knows whites are so lazy.

• [ocker3]

  She lost me at “bring it in”, perhaps that’s just something from a section of the USA I never experienced, but the rest of it was pretty funny, I’d go see them if they came to my town (but I live in Australia now). And I don’t hate Muslims, so I’m perhaps not one of the people they’re trying to reach, I would pay to go to a performance of this though, looks like they’d have good material. 

  I really do hope Western Society can find a way to deal with Islam, perhaps one problem is all the moderates are moving to other countries leaving all the extremists behind to make lots of noise and issue strange fatwas. Not sure what the solution to that is though.

• [Tuff Luke]

  Oh hey, it’s Negin Farsad.  It’s good to see she’s made/making another movie after Nercore Rising.

  • [MC Frontalot]

    WORD.

• [Brian Westley]

  They didn’t go with “The Muslims Are Coming, The Muslims Are Coming!” ?