“Culture creates awareness around issues, it entertains and saddens, it can encourage commitment to a social contract or strengthen personal hygiene in public. Culture is that powerful. Culture creates the icons we follow, that we see ourselves in, that we orient ourselves toward. It's culture that tells us to love or hate, accept or tolerate, embrace or reject.” LoveHateCultureIconsAcceptance Of OthersCulture Identity Book:How to Make White People Laugh Source: How to Make White People Laugh
“The biggest challenge in making movies, boring but true answer is money - you never have enough, so everything gets bootstrapped to death! I learned not only how to be better filmmakers because of it but better janitors, better drivers and better negotiators with cops who wanted to shut me down. You have to get creative.” EnoughChallengesCreativeBoringFilmmakerCopJanitor Author:Negin Farsad
“We twist ourselves into knots convincing people that Islam is peaceful and varied before we realize that, wait a second, you can be a Muslim while also recognizing that Islam doesn't even explain half of your behaviors!” PeopleWaitingRealizingBehaviorIslamPeacefulConvincing Author:Negin Farsad
“I mostly want to highlight things that feel like an injustice, and that's not really political. No one is going to - or should - say that bigotry toward Muslims is partisan. It's a matter of being just or not being just. So that's why I started calling myself a social justice comedian.” PoliticalJusticeSocial JusticeInjusticeComedianBigotry Author:Negin Farsad
“There's something about political comedy that sometimes closes people off, and my general goal is to open people right up.” PeopleSometimesPoliticalGoalComedy Author:Negin Farsad
“I one hundred percent recognize that comedy is a more narcissistic profession and that I cannot directly improve people's lives the way I could if I had stayed in the policy world. But the trade-off is that I'm happier doing jokes.” WorldComedyPolicyJokesProfessionNarcissistic Author:Negin Farsad
“We're always going to be cherry-picking to make religion make sense. Especially in the modern context.” ModernMake Sense Author:Negin Farsad
“I knew that the black struggle wasn't my struggle. But I felt like it was my-struggle-adjacent, you know? I've always said that if you turn the dial in one direction, a Muslim is a Jew is an East Asian person is a Native American and so on. I feel very much that all of these struggles are kind of the same and - Hillary Clinton actually said this recently - when you get rid of one barrier, it opens up the gates for a whole bunch of people you didn't even know would benefit from it. So not fighting for the black struggle is like not fighting for the Muslim struggle.” PeopleKindFightingBlackStruggleClintonJewNativeBarriersGatesNative AmericanMy Struggle Author:Negin Farsad
“In general, I think there are some things that require time before you can talk about them. Some stuff that happened over the summer, for instance - the Philando Castile shooting, Alton Sterling, the police officers in Dallas - there was no room for jokes. But there are, of course, the policies that have given us those events. Now, there's a lot of room for jokes there. When you're looking at something difficult to talk about, there's always a sideways way in that feels a little less personal to people. That's where the joke lives.” PeopleThinkingDifficultPolicySummerJokesPolicePolice OfficerSideways Author:Negin Farsad
“Thanks to the Internet, I think, a lot of hate has moved to more anonymous venues. A lot of people get their aggression out that way. Or they do some drive-by hating—you know, where they’re in a car and they yell something stupid out the window at a stoplight and then take off. It’s just not as involved and laborious to be a hater as it used to be. There’s not as much face-to-face interaction. Facebook’s made ’em lazy.” PeopleThinkingHateCarStupidInternetWindowMovedThanksLazyAggressionHate You Author:Negin Farsad
“The fundamental truth guiding social justice comedy is that people are not shitty. That sounds cheesy, but that's how I have to approach it. Everybody has the capacity for change.” PeopleJusticeComedySocial JusticeCheesy Author:Negin Farsad
