Negin Farsad

Negin has devoted large parts of her career to social justice comedy, particularly as it relates to Islamophobia, immigrant rights, bigotry and any general lameness foisted on people because of race, religion, socio-economic class, or third arms. These kinds of cultural divides really get her goat! As a policy advisor for the city of New York she worked on the city’s campaign finance initiative, a program that tries to level the playing field for candidates that aren’t made of money. She took that know-how into her comedy with such works as Bootleg Islam—an off-Broadway solo show about a boozy trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran, naturally. She gleaned lessons from her two-person Edinburgh Fringe Festival musical The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Romantic Comedy, not to mention her work with the standup show, The Dirty Immigrant Collective. Her most recent work, the feature documentary The Muslims Are Coming! takes a group of Muslim-American comedians on the road to unlikely stops in generally red states to perform shows, meet locals and dispel Islamophobia through jokes! The film features the likes of Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, Lewis Black, David Cross, and Janeane Garofalo among others. But more importantly, the making of this kind of work has given Negin gads—yes gads!—of anecdotes from the frontlines of prejudice AND a prescription for how to change the discourse. She brings real world activist comedy experience, a dash of comedy philosophy, and a touch of public policy for an engaging and definitely hilarious look at the issues. Here’s a good start: make white people laugh. Oh you want to hear more, do you? She’ll just have to highjack powerpoint and bring it to your campus.