March 4, 2020 • 45 mins
Samara chats with the comedian and writer about how to work a crowd and how to change comedy bro culture from the inside--and how that applies to all of our work cultures. Like, who gets to decide what's funny anyway?
Host: Samara Bay
Executive producers: Catherine Burt Cantin & Mark Cantin, Double Vision www.doublevisionprojects.com
Producers: Samara Bay, Sophie Lichterman and the iHeart team
Theme music: Mark Cantin
For more on Pop Culture Collaborative: https://popcollab.org/
For more on The Opportunity Agenda: https://www.opportunityagenda.org/
For more on Zahra: @zahracomedy on Twitter
For more on Lisa Marie Rollins: @thirdrootprod on Twitter
For more on Mary Beard: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/30/mary-beard-the-cult-of
For more info on honoring native lands: https://usdac.us/nativeland
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is from British classicist Mary Beard's manifesto called Women
and Power, which is super short and pretty powerful. She says,
we find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority
of the deep male voice in contrast to the female.
As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low
(00:21):
pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high pitched voice female cowardice.
Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of
women's speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice
of the male orator, but also, and I love this,
the social and political stability, the health of the whole state.
(00:47):
So that's what we're doing. Our voice is a reflection
of our life experience, ants where we've been, and who
we've listened to. But we can also own it and
even change it if we want. This is the podcast
(01:08):
that's all about the voice, but it's also all about power.
Who has it, how we get it, how we sound
when we have it. I'm Samara Bay. I'm a dialect
coach for actors in Hollywood on movies like the upcoming
Wonder Woman's sequel and a bunch of other stuff I
can't talk about. And I'm also a speech coach for entrepreneurs,
(01:29):
for politicians, for women everywhere ready to use their voice
to get what they want. Welcome to permission to speak.
Let's do this. Today's guest is Zara nor Box. She
is an Iranian American comedian whose latest one woman show
is called On Behalf of All Muslims Colon, a comedy special.
(01:54):
I find her fascinating. She teamed up with a philanthropic
organization called Pop Culture Collaborative, which you should look up.
It's awesome. Their mission is I have it here. It
states that through partnerships between the social justice sector and
the pop culture industries, the Collaborative believes activists, artists, and
philanthropists can encourage mass audiences to reckon with the past
(02:18):
and rewrite the story of our nation's future. I mean
basically want to just like stand up out of my
chair and applaud So Pop Culture Collaborative actually paid Zara
to spend a year analyzing how to basically solve bro
comedy culture, and we get to talk about that in
this interview. I wanted to have her on because of that,
(02:40):
and because I feel like she's an amazing example of
somebody who is fearlessly diving into the somewhat thankless mess
of how to talk seriously about what it is to
be funny and what it takes to actually make social change.
And I also wanted to have her on because the
story of how she found her own voice as somebody
(03:01):
who you know sort of very much shows up in
a room as a quote unquote outsider in the comedy
world for being a woman, for being a woman of color,
for being a woman who's queer, for being you know,
the list of things, and bonus, she tells us about
crowd work, which I feel like when a comedian is
willing to tell you how to work crowd and how
to get them on your side, even when they seem
a little hostile up top, like you should listen and
(03:24):
with that, here she is. So you're a comedian. One
of the things that you have talked about is this
sense that we all have that comedy is uh and
historically has been developed in bars and nightclubs, and thus
is inevitably somewhat misogynistic because there is a culture there
(03:45):
that is pretty set. You were interviewed in an article
for Bustle Online, and this is the quote The underdog
ends up being the guy at the bar trying to score.
As a woman in that scene, I felt like I
was always responding to either how fuckable or unfusckable I was.
I didn't have a language to kind of say, oh,
I'm being tasked with identifying myself with the male gaze
(04:07):
at the bar and then proving that I can be
funnier than them by being more crass. I had no
interest in doing that, and at the time, how that
translated for me is that I just wasn't good. Yep.
I read that and was like, God, that feels like
putting into words probably so many people's experience, whether actually
it's for comedy or just for work culture, like why
(04:29):
am I not funny? Oh? I know because of my audience,
not because of me? So I mean my real question
is like, what was your process out of that? How
did you find your voice? Well? I think a big
part of it was learning how to name all of
the obstacles. Yeah, because I think, like I said, like,
(04:50):
at that time, all these things just get categorized as
just well, you're just not good, you just don't have it,
You're just not dedicated. It's about your work ethic, and
so then those things just kind of make you go, well,
there's it's not actionable. There's nothing I can do about
the fact that I'm just not good at this. I
lean on a lot of my actor training to go like,
(05:10):
you know, okay, So then how do I change that?
Because if it's a moral or ethical thing, there's not
much I can do about that. That's a that's a
state of being, you know, and and that's in my head.
But if it's about how I engage with the audience differently,
the questions that I asked differently, the stage setups that
I seek out, the theatrical constructs that I'm looking for.
And what I started to notice was, Okay, hold up.
(05:32):
You know I studied meta theater in UH college. What
is meta theater? Meta theater is the theater of theater,
you know, Like right now we're in a podcast booth
and we're having a conversation. It's facilitating the opportunity for
us to dive deep on a conversation that we wouldn't
have if there was the distractions of our day. So
(05:53):
in stand up comedy, the theater of it all is okay,
we can stop worrying about each other. We're we're gonna
take hits and we're gonna send hits, and that's part
of the relief, right. But the thing is, if you're
a person who walks around already feeling like no one's
paying enough attention to the hits coming your way, that's
(06:17):
not at all a relief. It's very stressful, but it's
very bro. It's very bro for guys to get together
and be like, anybody, yeah, you know, you could take
that right, and it's like and it's all play and
that's fun for them, and surprise, it's difficult for guys
to learn it's not fun for you. What do you know?
(06:40):
I don't like it. I'm sorry, you know that. That's
tough for them to hear, especially when surprise they're getting off,
they're having a relaxed experience. And it creeped me out
that like, this sort of standard of funny that we've
set is really rooted in a suspension enough disbelief that's
(07:01):
about a step away from rape culture. You've got a
theatrical construct that's in a bar, and you've got a
bar's power dynamic dictating the way that people engage with
each other and celebrate. So then everybody who's the underdog
at a bar is the guy trying to score. Everybody
who's in the way of that is the jerk or
(07:23):
the hot girl who won't give it away. The jerk.
She's the jerk, you know. But if you really open
up the framing of it and you make the theater bigger,
you know, cinematic, and you go okay. Well, when she
woke up this morning, her hair went one direction and
(07:45):
her calic was doing its thing, and she had to like,
you know, take a shower, brush out her hair, get
a product that's like you know, doing something to her
brain through its skull, and then she had to like
you know, put all kinds of like chemicals on her
face and watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials that she's
been watching since she was fifteen too, like manufacture a
(08:06):
look of natural. And then all of that is like
expenses that she doesn't have, and makeup she's relying on
that she's invested in for like three years, and she's
hoping that all of these things are going to like
pull together the same face she had yesterday. But somehow,
with the humidity and the sweat of the environment of
like a stressful meeting, made her makeup like really set
(08:29):
and she's been working on her body for like a
hundred years and so that she can like you know,
present to patriarchy. She shows up at this bar and
really she's just looking for a good lay with a
good guy who's not going to kill her. Like now
you have an underdog with a much more powerful foe,
but it takes time. You have to develop that. And
(08:50):
so then that was the other obstacle was like, Okay,
there's no time at a bar. I have to win
folks over in ten seconds. I have ten seconds, actly five,
but ten seconds, and I have to work off of
who they see, you know. So then you've got these
comedians who get regulated to storytelling and one person shows
(09:11):
when really the reason why we're doing that is because
to bring everybody the real underdogs that we are in
our lives, we have to go into a story. Yeah,
it's unfamiliar to folks, and so that's what I wanted
to do with this report that I did through Pop
Culture Collaborative was to like really make it clear to
people all of the things that make it impossible to
(09:32):
be funny like your guy friend, and that every time
we are funny like them, that's not revolutionary, we're just
inhabiting patriarchy in a different kind of way, like we
figured out how to assimilate, but it definite leave us.
So yeah, I want to talk about this study on
doing deep dive. I you know, came across obviously you're comedian,
(09:54):
your writer at your podcast host, which we want to
talk about as well, but you're also an activist. I
don't know if that's the word that you use for it,
but you're very much if we're still allowed to say
disrupting oh quotes, you know, like comedy culture, not just
by existing although in that regard as well, but also
specifically by doing this study with this organization that you
(10:16):
just referenced. I'm assumming getting paid to do so and
really looking at not only this issue of like what's
funny for who, but also the pipeline that that ends
up affecting. And I specifically want you to tell us
about it in terms of this idea of tension versus release,
because this is exists in comedy. I don't know if
(10:38):
if people outside of the comedy world think about this equation,
but this feels like kind of an age old comedy
equation that there's tension and then the comedian releases the
tension with the punch line and everybody goes ha ha, yeah,
and you're this seemed like your way in that you
were like, hold up, what makes us all tense is
not the same? Yes, how did they find you? How
did you find them? And how did you decide to
(10:59):
sort of do this and didn't reveal. I met up
for coffee with Bridget Antoinette Evans and Tracy events like
and I complained about comedy for an hour and then
I got a grant. There's really something to be said
for everybody taking an acting class man, because you really
(11:19):
have to get specific about your obstacles and then you
know what, then you can articulate them to people. And
I had the benefit also of being invited to the
Sundance Creative Change Retreat presented by an organization called the
Opportunity Agenda. And I call them the liberal Illuminati, because
I was like, who are you? I want to know them.
You look very powerful to me, and you are everywhere,
(11:44):
but no one knows this, uh. And they brought together
all these folks from all these different areas for activism
and I was there with Harry and come out and
you know, like as peers. And I was like, whoa
hold up, I'm quitting comedy also, and they were like
why and I was like, here's why. And I laid
(12:05):
out for them all my complaints, like I can't do
this because of this, and I can't do that because
of that, and they said, your complaints are analysis. And
I had not pursued academia beyond my bachelor's you know,
so like I never thought about it that way. I
was always just you know, trying to fix what's broken
(12:25):
and it wasn't working and I just was stuck. And
they were like, that's racism, that's institutionalized racism. And I
was like, no way. I mean, this turns back into
the first question to write. I mean it really nick
naming stuff. You know, words are problematic, but words are
also incredibly valuable. When it's like, oh, this weird experience
(12:48):
I'm having that makes me feel like even more other
than than ever, because I feel like I'm having a
different experience than everyone else. That word instantly makes me
feel like, oh, I'm actually having a related experience to
a bunch of p who all feel like they're having
these solo, isolated experiences exactly, and then when I started
talking about it, then people would say things like, oh
my god, I have that. In the medical field, Oh
(13:10):
I have that. As a classical musician, Oh I have that.
You know where we get put in these physicians where
we have to explain the distance between our context and
people's expectation of our context. Say more about that in
terms of like stereotypes or what you mean when you're
an ethnically ambiguous woman and you get up on stage
and the audience wants to know where you're from, and
(13:32):
there's a power dynamic that exists with women that is attention,
that is, you know, I have an expectation, I have
a question, answer it. And when you're a woman, that
power dynamic of like I need something from you, give
it to me exists is normative and subconscious and habitual.
(13:52):
And when you're a woman of color, than the expectation
for people to educate about where you're like, don't just
don't just relieve my tension, but also fill in all
of the gaps of anything I've ever wanted to know
since you're here, if you don't mind exactly exactly, And
especially with liberal audiences, because they believe that it is
(14:13):
their job to learn from difference. They're pre set to
expect that when difference presents itself on stage, they should
learn from difference, and so then that learning kills comedy.
Nobody laughs when they're learning. You can't learn when you're laughing.
You laugh when you get it. You laugh because you
(14:35):
just told me something that I already knew, and I
forgot that I knew it. Oh you're human, I forgot. Sorry,
that's funny. How did I forget that? You know? Oh?
You do that just like me. Oh my god, I
recognize that. But when we're learning, we stop laughing. We
listen when we're actually learning, and you know that experience
of when people are actually listening to you versus when
they're not right. We all know that feeling. So in
(14:58):
comedy like tension. I mean, you ever get a breathless laugh.
It's the worst thing in the world. People have to
go ha ha ha. They have to take a breath
in if that anticipation is not there and someone wants
to agree with you or disagree with you or what
you just said. They think they know where you're going,
(15:19):
but they're not sure. They see a magic tricks about
to happen, and they want to catch it before you
trick them. That has to be there, that tension has
to exist. But what happens for people who are not
sis hetero white men on stage is that it's not
(15:39):
the normative social experience for us to have authorship over
that tension. When we see a white guy on stage
with a mic, we go, oh, what's he gonna do
with that power? And then we're along for the ride.
When I take that mic, then people go, wait, where
are you from? And how did you get here? And
where are your parents? And how did they get here?
(16:00):
And do they approve of what you're saying? And do
I agree that I'm going to let you be in
charge of that? That's a lot Before I opened my mouth,
I mean, this is so genius exactly, And I mean
so then the question, of course, is like, so, what's
the solution so people like you don't quit? I'll say
this because it's never one solution, right, you know, we
say it takes a village. But I think what we
(16:22):
forget about that is it's not just people. It's also institutions.
So it's not just about the people in the audiences,
it's also about the pipelines. It's also about those gatekeepers.
It's also about the metrics that we use to gauge
a laugh. It's also about the way that we determine
whether or not a comedian successful. What are we gonna
do if all of the time the metric for success
(16:44):
is how heartily you laugh at what you already knew
to be true. Yep, we can't move forward real far.
So what I think we have to remember is it's
not always meant to be funny to you. You know,
we're not the every tension romans that it's not always
(17:07):
meant for everybody. Right. So if that's the case, if
it's not good and I and people always say, like,
you know, guy, I'll get a lot of bro comics
who are like, what are we gonna do with comedy
if it's not about laughter? And it's like, okay, I'm sorry,
Gallagher tours. There are comedians making money who aren't funny.
People will survive, the industry will survive, Capitalism will still thrive.
(17:32):
Don't worry. You know, I lost a friendship over Nanette. Oh.
Nanetta is a classic stand up comedy structure. It's fucking stunning. Uh.
And he is a comedian of color and could not
wrap his mind around the fact that if it wasn't
funny to him, it should not have any value to
(17:52):
anybody else, and that that was something that offended me.
I'm scared for you that you have a friend like that.
Well not anymore. I'll tell you why. Nana is a
classic comedic structure. Comedy is a personal essay. You begin
with an argument, you carry it all the way through,
example after example after example, you make a case. It's
not about subplots. It's not about wrapping up you know
(18:13):
what he said or she said or they did. It's
about the argument. So Nnette Show is an argument, you know,
and then too it closes on the highest point of tension.
That's comedy, the mic drop. But the thing is the
celebration for Nanette. What makes it so impactful, which is
a real metric for success in comedy, and what makes
(18:35):
it so revolutionary is that the mic drop comes when
they let the tension release for them and not the crowd.
This is a celebration for me. It lands on you buy.
That's the greatest mic drop of all time. It's fantastic
and it's classic comedy. Okay, we'll be back, Okay, We're back,
(19:05):
and we were talking in the break and I want
to bring this up because this whole idea of tension
and releasing the tension does remind me of, you know,
being a woman, and how much the idea of people pleasing.
I mean, I showed you I have a pin on
my jacket today that's like a little award for not
pleasing everybody, which I almost wear ironically because i feel
(19:28):
like I get through a whole day and I'm like,
oh funk, I pleased everybody I can. I'm trying not
to because that means, you know, but it's a lot
of mental labor, Okay. So on Maslow's hierarchy of needs
is like a pyramid right of like safety at the
physiological level, belonging you know, community and uh esteem and
(19:51):
then self actualization. And so many times folks think that
they're having a conversation at the level of self actualization,
like we're just talking extractly, right, when they don't realize
that for the other person, it's hitting them in a
space of belonging, you know, whether or not they feel
connected to that other person anymore, like you lost your friend, right,
And I think for women are sense of belonging, likability, accommodation.
(20:18):
All those things threatened our belonging, but also belonging for
us as capital, yeah where property, you know, and for
people of color this is even more triggering. So you
know when people say, like, don't be so accommodating, or
you know, don't be so gracious, or you know, don't
try to please everybody, it's like, well, it's not really
(20:40):
always up to me though, And that's also not a
percent of the time a way that I can be
successful institutionally speaking. I mean this on a really practical
level is also why I pushed back as a professional
voice coach on like making fun of girls for vocal
fry yoh yeah, Like, can I admit that sound repeatedly
(21:05):
without break is like a little bit jarring and I
want somebody to breathe a little bit more sure, But
on a much more holistic level, if we're talking about
what's happening societally for that human being trying to make
it in the world and get some of their needs met,
I bet that vocal fries helping them get there. There's
a sense of belonging because boy do they sound like
their peers. There's a sense of safety because they're not
(21:27):
scaring that guy. See. See this is the thing is like,
sometimes I wonder if leadership is its own pronoun. Who wait,
what's like? What if I was just like yeah, will
be like, uh say more because I see so many
(21:50):
women who inhabit leadership. But there's a masculine edge to
it somehow that we have to present and perform to.
And sometimes that's natural to us. It doesn't feel like
a performance, and sometimes it's a performance because it's like,
we all have masculine and feminine energies and that's cool.
But if we're just like ratching up the masculine because
it's inherently coded as more powerful in this world, then
(22:12):
we're never actually finding what female leadership sounds like. And
by the way, that's the point of this podcast. Like
if uh, if an orc came in to tell me
that the company is failing, then I am gonna be
focused on the fact that the company is failing. Like
why does it matter how you present? You know I've
already been hired, you checked my resume, you read my references.
(22:37):
I have been here. I'm here because you have the
stipulated trust in me in this position. So when I
tell you we're screwed and you're in trouble, then everything
moves forward from there. Why is it backward in an
attack on my character? Obviously, logically that makes a lot
of sense, right, Everything else is sexism. You don't like
(22:58):
the package? Why are you looking at the package? And
it's so sexist to examine and evaluate the value of
the package. I want to ask about your podcast Good
Muslimpad Muslim, which recently aired its final episode after five years,
and specifically in terms of how revealing we are publicly,
which is obviously something I'm considering having my own nascent podcast.
(23:19):
But also I see you know, quote unquote influences or
anybody on the interwebs struggling with this and that sense
of like I would like to reveal authentic things about
myself because it feels like I'm finding my community, and
also some of it feels like I'm doing it for
other people and it doesn't like what how do you
(23:40):
figure out what's private? Oh? Yeah, that's a great question
for me. Safety has played a big role in that,
you know, because being an Iranian woman in this country
continues to be a more and more dangerous thing. I
always thought that I didn't have to really be all
that aware of politics. And part of the reason why
I got into comedy ha ha was to escape politics.
I wanted to be able to just be silly, imagine that,
(24:02):
just be funny. And then I realized when I got
invited to this conference and you run, that turned out
I think to be a scam maybe um that I
can't do that. I have to actually keep up, you know,
and know what I'm up against. Uh, speaking of those obstacles,
and that sucks because there are some things that I
want to be able to talk about that I think
are important to talk about, but it just puts me
(24:22):
at a risk that is, you know, um, not worth it.
And on the other hand, you have talked really openly
about a lot of things from your surgery two sexuality exactly.
I was going to say, your reaction to the Pulse
student night club shooting. Yeah, I came out as bisexual.
Part of the blessing and curse of me is that
(24:44):
I have to dialogue it in order to know what
it is that I'm thinking, which can be tough for
folks who care a lot about what people say. You know,
for all that invested, I'm always trying to figure out, well,
is this the word you know, like you said, it's
words are so fluid for me, like they they're they're
so restricative, and you're we're always looking for like is
(25:04):
this the right now? Phrase? I wanted to understood. I mean,
that's why we communicate literally, Yes, is this? Why is this?
How is this? You know? Um? I actually took communications
coaching because I was in a leadership position I got.
I was project manager of a company and I didn't
know what that meant. Was you swallow blame? Well, they
(25:28):
never tell you that, and they promote you. And I
got an evaluation at three sixty evaluation where they said, uh,
you're too tall and too loud, and just because you're
tall and loud doesn't mean when you get you get
what you want. You're a brasive and nobody likes you.
We haven't liked you for the last five years. Okay,
this is mostly women. One guy. It was hilarious as
(25:50):
I got the position because I was scary enough that
I could contend with the one guy. Oh my god,
I mean that's why I was there was none of
them wanted to hold the accountable. But then in the
process of me holding everyone accountable, then it came to
that and I could have left, but I wanted to
know why did this happen? Yeah, and I had a
(26:11):
friend who was doing communications coaching, and I asked her
she could come in and I learned so much and
she taught me that charisma is the ability to speak
to people's strengths and that in times of crisis, we
all think that everyone will show up as their best self,
but really people will show up as their worst self.
It's our most primitive base selves is what's gonna show
(26:35):
up because it's not practiced. We don't practice crisis. And
kind of crisis do you think she's talking about there,
Like when we're in a position of conflict with somebody,
that's what. Because there's there's some like there's some really lovely,
kind of Mr. Rogers type sentiment about how in like
massive you know, typhoon types of people will people will
(26:55):
really like save each other and surprise each other and
strangers end up, you know, being really loving. And you
can point to that, but I think actually what's much
more interesting, because it happens much more regularly for our lives,
is what you're talking about, the kind type of prices
where you're being called on ship and all of your
all of your internal biases come to the surface. Yes, exactly,
not the tsunami, but the tsunami of the soul. Yeah,
(27:18):
the white fragility suit is what's practiced. One of the
other lessons she gave me was I don't have to
say all of the processing part out loud, And she
taught me this phrase, I think you can trust yourself
to blank blank blank. I said that to my actors
(27:39):
all the time, right, It's such a call to instinct, Yeah,
rather than what do you mean by tell me more
about the processing thing? So you know, I was constantly
afraid that I wasn't doing things right, that I was
an accommodating people correctly, and especially after that meeting, it
didn't help my fear of belonging and certainly made it
(27:59):
difficult to hold pop full accountable. But what she was
saying to me was, or what I heard, was that
I can rely on the capabilities that I have already
in place to examine my thoughts as they come up
and take a moment to decide whether or not those
are the things that I want to discuss. And she said,
(28:23):
if you don't know yet, then let the person know
you need some time, trust that they can handle that
you need a pause. And it was such a beautiful
way to put it, because it wasn't like I didn't
think I deserved it. It was that I was afraid
(28:44):
that everything would go awry because there was always such
a sense of urgency. And it's like the other half
of permission to speak is permission to not speak. Yeah, Okay,
writing this tsunami of practical advice, I'd like to ask
you for some tips. I specifically would like to focus
on your experience in front of crowds. I think a
(29:05):
lot of listeners are not necessarily comedians, but they are
having more and more opportunities slash, you know, challenging themselves
into being in public, speaking in public, and you know,
not everybody is like a crowd. That's my sweet spot.
But it feels like you've found that. I mean, I
do love the last paragraph of one of your MPR
(29:27):
pieces that's about Jemma that I pronounce it. This is
about the mass shooting at christ Church. So you know, morning,
you said, and this is coming off of your surgery
for thyroid cancer that made it hard for your neck
to participate in communication. Yeah you said it. Wasn't the
(29:49):
first mass shooting, it wouldn't be the last. So often
tragedy is what brings us together. That it made me
appreciate the ritual of Gemma all the more, which is
Friday gathering. Growing up, we went to mosque every Friday.
Whether enjoy sorrow, grief, or uncertainty. I think it's because
of that tradition that I love performing live so much,
even when it's just with a dozen friends in my
(30:10):
living room, even when it runs me ragged, I love
being there with the crowd. And now I might have
a scar to remind me just how much. Yeah, but
I really I loved a lot about that, obviously, but
specifically I want to talk about that. It's a different
way of envisioning. It's a different theater of the theater
of the relationship with the crowd. So it isn't just like,
(30:31):
oh god, I'm up here and people are looking at me. Yes,
So talk about that, like, how do you create a
sense of like we're all in this together? Well, I
go super like, I dive deep into nature. This is
for me. I go, you're my guest dude. Other people,
(30:54):
this is I'm giving the advice that works for me
I do a deep dive into nature, and I'm like, okay,
what's up meat? Sex? Here? We are these organisms, these bodies, right,
So what are the hierarchies about? And I asked myself
what really is at stake? And I engage with all
the doubt. I always say to my students, the people
(31:17):
I mentor lean into the self doubt, trust the self doubt,
because especially for us, as women, women of color, otherwise voices,
there's so much that we have to just push aside
into subconscious and move forward, you know. And then when
we're called upon to be highlighted, that self doubt has
(31:40):
never had its time in the sun, you know, it's yeah,
So then it's just all anxiety. It's just all fuzz,
you know, And so we have to unpack it, unpack, unpack, unpack.
So I asked myself, what's at steak? What's actually at stake? Well,
I get fired. Is my reputation at steak? You know?
Am I in actual danger? And and if I can
(32:00):
say yes to any of that, then I'll say, well,
then is there another way for me to approach this topic?
Because if that's really true, then let's not do that
to me, you know, And then sometimes I re contextualize
because sometimes my anxiety is the exhilaration and excitement, and
I'm not as practiced in owning and enjoying and embodying exhilaration,
(32:26):
you know, as a woman. For me, it was always
about bottling it up. Bottle it up, push it to
the side. Bottle it up, push it to the side.
Don't be too loud, don't be too you know, you're
too tall, You're too loud. Right, So I'm really practiced
and being small, And so then I say, I'm really exhilarated.
I'm very excited, you know. And then sometimes I think
about the scarcity of experience. How many times will I
(32:49):
have a chance to do this kind of performance. It
means a lot to me, and because I think it's
really important to always lean on our instincts in an
athletic experience. That's the most like primal instinct we have,
you know, it goes back millennia. I feel my quads
and I actually massage my quads and I do like everybody, Yeah,
(33:15):
it's your fight or flight. Think about it. When you bolt,
what's got to kick in your hamstrings? In your quads go?
You know, So I lean into my quads, and for
the lines that I'm the most afraid of, you know,
with a crowd that I find them in my quads,
you know, I just like lunge into them. And then
(33:36):
I remember that the audience is my partner on stage there,
my scene partner, and that they're there to do a
job with me, is to have a good time. And
I speak to their strengths. Yeah, you guys know how
to have a good time. We know how to do this,
We know how to let go. And if they don't know,
(33:57):
then I asked them about it. So you know what
is that about? And people also know what it means
to be a heckler to take up too much stage time.
And so why lean on that? You know you're doing
that thing? Friends and move to the other person, and
I build community, you know, and sometimes I split the
audience in half. The advice that one of my great
mentors w Kmlbell, comedian Emmy winner United States of America
(34:21):
on CNN, I'll be in the spring season, watch it.
He used to say, never let the audience be a
faceless mass, hold them accountable, assign them an opinion, let
them voice that they disagree, but make them do their job.
They're a live crowd for a reason. It's not television.
And I put in every performance I think of something
(34:44):
new that I'm trying to gain some new information. You know,
what if there's more to this joke, What if there's
more to this idea or this premise? What do you
mean about the separating them in half thing? So I'll say,
you know, you guys are amazing over here, but this
side so very conscious, very like out loud, yes, yeah,
very out loud. This side, I don't know what's happening
(35:06):
with you. You folks are with me? Or sometimes I'll
just find the one person who gets it and I'll
alienate everyone else and connect with that one person. Then
what happens is people lean in, and then other people
lean in, and then the person who is making it
a terrible show the whole time makes themselves clear. And
what ends up happening is people walk away going that
(35:27):
was a weird crowd, not you bombed. Yeah, crowd work
well in any presentation. I think people just forget that
the audience is in a relationship with you. They're they're
in a dynamic with you, and if you feel like
they've turned into an evaluative mass then hold them accountable
for that. And if you don't know how to do that,
(35:49):
then those are the things to prepare yourself with. And
you are suggesting for yourself that one of the tools
is to literally ask them. Yeah, because we do for get.
I mean, I coach people in this and you know,
sometimes I'm like, if there's something you don't know about
people up top, and it's not even a hostile crowd
as just you literally you've done a bunch of research,
(36:10):
but like who actually showed up to this I don't
know fundraiser or conference, ask questions, get a show of hands,
or get people to voice. But like the more you know,
the better. But also theater wise, that's a way of saying, like,
you guys are participants, were in a room together, We're
all meet sacks in a room together. Let's like not
pretend we're not exactly. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break,
(36:31):
and then when we come back, we're going to find
out whose voice Zara admires. Okay, we're back, and Zara,
tell us who you chose. Lisa Marie Rollins, Yes, tell
(36:53):
me about her. She's my director for my comedy special
on Behalf of All Muslims a comedy special, and she
she really supported me in the vision for the show.
And I've been following her career for a real long time,
in part because she's amazing, and in part because we
started out together as solo performers in W. Kmal Belle
(37:14):
Solo Performance Workshop. And at that time, I remember she
was producing for him, and the way that she would
hold space and then can be a student with us,
you know, be production manager here and then come sitting
in class at us and then and I um, I
(37:35):
just saw all of the different ways that she engaged
with people, crowds, spaces. She was always thinking about kind
of what's the construct and seeing, you know, what does
she need from it? And how does she give to it?
And I don't know that she necessarily thinks about it consciously.
(37:56):
I just saw how fluidly she moved through it, and
it really struck me and I really admired it. And
then when it came to my show, Oh man, did
I rely on her so much to speak multiple languages
of academia, comedy theater, even you know, philanthropy in the
grant writing process, in addition to just how she held
(38:18):
vision for this medium of stand up comedy, which is
like a singular individual up against the needs of a
theater space that wants, you know, spectacle for its audience live,
you know, not just one person up against the blank.
You know. It also strikes me we're gonna listen to
her in a second, but a lot of her public
(38:39):
work as a playwright and as a writer is about
her as she calls a transracial adoption experience, which means
that she's mixed race, right, and what that did for her,
I'm wondering, you know. It's it's really like the idea
of code switching, which is a really like a well
known trope in certainly an African American culture, because you
(39:03):
have to you you you were raised to feel like
you have to speak differently in different contexts in order
to be taken seriously in different context is something we
actually all do. It's like totally a linguistic thing. We
all talked differently to different people. But it doesn't have
as much of a loaded quality to it when you know,
we aren't in like a less dominant culture and having
to sort of prove ourselves. But I'm sure that's something
that's so front of mine for her. So the way
(39:24):
that you just describe that experience of her being able
to kind of chameleon in various spaces, feels like it
may be something that was like a lifelong skill. Oh,
absolutely absolutely, we're gonna listen role vast. But there was
something she said in here. She was being interviewed about
her writing style and like her relationship to the whole, Like,
you're only a legit writer if you carve out four
(39:46):
hours a day and it's the same exact four hours
every day, and like, you know, the sort of discipline
side of being a writer. And this was her response
as a person who acknowledges how all the aspects of
my life informed mus help as a writer, my teaching work,
my activist work, my racial positionality, all of those things
(40:08):
inform who I am. It's part of the feeling of
my creative well. And so this notion that I just
have to be sitting all day and outputting without any
kind of mental, spiritual, physical intake was not right for me.
When I'm hearing her voice, she's on like a really
technical level. She's using a lot of pitch. She does
(40:29):
a little bit of a special kind of upspeak that
isn't like I end all of my thoughts with a
question accidentally, but rather it's like an in the middle
of a long thought, like I'm about I'm saying the
first half of it so that then you have the
payoff at the end of it, which is like a
kind of upspeak that we all do that we should
do because it's I mean, I'm putting in quotes, but
like it's it's good storytelling. The two main things that
(40:52):
I feel when I'm listening to her speak just really
really technically is one that she's using pitch and things
like you know what I was just describing that are
classic kind of storytelling modes, like i have a long
and complicated thought, but I'm going to take care of
you as I go through it a and be there's
like there's there's like a motion in it, like you
(41:14):
can see her voice almost like cracked at this one
moment and she didn't give a fuck, but like there.
You know, how we talk about things that matter to
us in a way that sounds like they matter to
us is something we've all, in certain ways been kind
of trained out of. This is part of why I
think vocal fry exists, because it's like it's waysy to
kind of hide behind like whatever, I don't really care
(41:34):
like this kind of thing, and as soon as you
put breath behind it, and then you have to acknowledge like, Okay,
my voice kind of wavered when I said that, because
I actually care, and that's something that all of us,
you know, I have absolutely this very weak dealt with Shoot,
I hear myself caring in my voice. Well, that's awkward.
I have to push through and just trust that it
(41:57):
would be even more I mean, you know, it would
be a different kind of awkward if I tried to
sound as flat and generic as possible, Like it would
save me in terms of my my embarrassment, but it
would not save me at all in terms of actually
getting across what I'm trying to get across and like
share a real connection with a human being. And we're
you know, part of working on our voices about like
(42:18):
prioritizing that, prioritizing human real human connection over saving face.
Mm hmmm, saving face. We know how to do. I
mean a lot of us at least there is that
sense of like whatever, as long as I sort of
don't really show up in a room, no one can
make fun of me. Yes, that's fine, that's fine, but
obviously that will not get us our dreams. That's me
on a Friday night. Yeah. Anyway, when I was saying
(42:41):
all that, you were like nodding because it feels like
it's sort of yeah, because I mean it points, it pinpoints,
like all the things that I was so drawn to
that I also wanted to emulate, you know, because of
course there's like code switching that we do right. And additionally,
there was a way that she held space in a room,
(43:04):
navigating how she engaged from what she needed. And I'm
especially when we met as a comedian and as a
young comedian, I'm so accustomed to accommodating the needs of
a crowd and always being high and always being up
here and always rallying, you know, um, and that space
(43:28):
of you know, unwavering liability. It was so different to inhabit,
you know, a different engagement. It's like a real gamble
in the moment, and the payoff is so much better
than if you hadn't taken the gamble. But why does
it feel scary? Yes? And I think that's everything is
seeing somebody achieve it is that really for me what
(43:52):
made her a role model and how I moved through
these artistic spaces. I love that. Thank you for bringing
her in and for letting us know better. Thank you. Yeah,
they'll be info about her in the show notes. Thank
you for being here, thank you for having me. Thank
you for the permission. You're welcome. Thank you to Zara
(44:13):
for coming in. You can find out more about her
in the show notes or on our website Permission to
Speak pod dot com. Also, you can go to Permission
to Speak pod dot com if you have any awesome
quotes you'd like me to read at the top of
the episodes, and if you have any questions, I will
do and ask me anything episode from time to time,
and I want to know what is getting in the
(44:33):
way of your voice. You can also send d M
s or voice messages to our instagram at Permission to
Speak Pod, where we're posting a bunch of content and
please join the community. Thanks as well to Sophie Lichterman
and the team at iHeart Radio, to Megan Read, to
my family and cohort, and to all of you. We're
(44:55):
recording this podcast in the I Heart Radio studios in Hollywood,
on land used to belong to the Tongva indigenous tribe,
and you can visit U s d a C dot
us to learn more about honoring native land. Permission to
Speak is a production of I Heart Radio and Double
Vision Executive produced by Katherine Burke Canton and Mark Canton.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, listen on the
(45:16):
ihart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
favorite shows.
This is from British classicist Mary Beard's manifesto called Women
and Power, which is super short and pretty powerful. She says,
we find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority
of the deep male voice in contrast to the female.
As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low
(00:21):
pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high pitched voice female cowardice.
Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of
women's speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice
of the male orator, but also, and I love this,
the social and political stability, the health of the whole state.
(00:47):
So that's what we're doing. Our voice is a reflection
of our life experience, ants where we've been, and who
we've listened to. But we can also own it and
even change it if we want. This is the podcast
(01:08):
that's all about the voice, but it's also all about power.
Who has it, how we get it, how we sound
when we have it. I'm Samara Bay. I'm a dialect
coach for actors in Hollywood on movies like the upcoming
Wonder Woman's sequel and a bunch of other stuff I
can't talk about. And I'm also a speech coach for entrepreneurs,
(01:29):
for politicians, for women everywhere ready to use their voice
to get what they want. Welcome to permission to speak.
Let's do this. Today's guest is Zara nor Box. She
is an Iranian American comedian whose latest one woman show
is called On Behalf of All Muslims Colon, a comedy special.
(01:54):
I find her fascinating. She teamed up with a philanthropic
organization called Pop Culture Collaborative, which you should look up.
It's awesome. Their mission is I have it here. It
states that through partnerships between the social justice sector and
the pop culture industries, the Collaborative believes activists, artists, and
philanthropists can encourage mass audiences to reckon with the past
(02:18):
and rewrite the story of our nation's future. I mean
basically want to just like stand up out of my
chair and applaud So Pop Culture Collaborative actually paid Zara
to spend a year analyzing how to basically solve bro
comedy culture, and we get to talk about that in
this interview. I wanted to have her on because of that,
(02:40):
and because I feel like she's an amazing example of
somebody who is fearlessly diving into the somewhat thankless mess
of how to talk seriously about what it is to
be funny and what it takes to actually make social change.
And I also wanted to have her on because the
story of how she found her own voice as somebody
(03:01):
who you know sort of very much shows up in
a room as a quote unquote outsider in the comedy
world for being a woman, for being a woman of color,
for being a woman who's queer, for being you know,
the list of things, and bonus, she tells us about
crowd work, which I feel like when a comedian is
willing to tell you how to work crowd and how
to get them on your side, even when they seem
a little hostile up top, like you should listen and
(03:24):
with that, here she is. So you're a comedian. One
of the things that you have talked about is this
sense that we all have that comedy is uh and
historically has been developed in bars and nightclubs, and thus
is inevitably somewhat misogynistic because there is a culture there
(03:45):
that is pretty set. You were interviewed in an article
for Bustle Online, and this is the quote The underdog
ends up being the guy at the bar trying to score.
As a woman in that scene, I felt like I
was always responding to either how fuckable or unfusckable I was.
I didn't have a language to kind of say, oh,
I'm being tasked with identifying myself with the male gaze
(04:07):
at the bar and then proving that I can be
funnier than them by being more crass. I had no
interest in doing that, and at the time, how that
translated for me is that I just wasn't good. Yep.
I read that and was like, God, that feels like
putting into words probably so many people's experience, whether actually
it's for comedy or just for work culture, like why
(04:29):
am I not funny? Oh? I know because of my audience,
not because of me? So I mean my real question
is like, what was your process out of that? How
did you find your voice? Well? I think a big
part of it was learning how to name all of
the obstacles. Yeah, because I think, like I said, like,
(04:50):
at that time, all these things just get categorized as
just well, you're just not good, you just don't have it,
You're just not dedicated. It's about your work ethic, and
so then those things just kind of make you go, well,
there's it's not actionable. There's nothing I can do about
the fact that I'm just not good at this. I
lean on a lot of my actor training to go like,
(05:10):
you know, okay, So then how do I change that?
Because if it's a moral or ethical thing, there's not
much I can do about that. That's a that's a
state of being, you know, and and that's in my head.
But if it's about how I engage with the audience differently,
the questions that I asked differently, the stage setups that
I seek out, the theatrical constructs that I'm looking for.
And what I started to notice was, Okay, hold up.
(05:32):
You know I studied meta theater in UH college. What
is meta theater? Meta theater is the theater of theater,
you know, Like right now we're in a podcast booth
and we're having a conversation. It's facilitating the opportunity for
us to dive deep on a conversation that we wouldn't
have if there was the distractions of our day. So
(05:53):
in stand up comedy, the theater of it all is okay,
we can stop worrying about each other. We're we're gonna
take hits and we're gonna send hits, and that's part
of the relief, right. But the thing is, if you're
a person who walks around already feeling like no one's
paying enough attention to the hits coming your way, that's
(06:17):
not at all a relief. It's very stressful, but it's
very bro. It's very bro for guys to get together
and be like, anybody, yeah, you know, you could take
that right, and it's like and it's all play and
that's fun for them, and surprise, it's difficult for guys
to learn it's not fun for you. What do you know?
(06:40):
I don't like it. I'm sorry, you know that. That's
tough for them to hear, especially when surprise they're getting off,
they're having a relaxed experience. And it creeped me out
that like, this sort of standard of funny that we've
set is really rooted in a suspension enough disbelief that's
(07:01):
about a step away from rape culture. You've got a
theatrical construct that's in a bar, and you've got a
bar's power dynamic dictating the way that people engage with
each other and celebrate. So then everybody who's the underdog
at a bar is the guy trying to score. Everybody
who's in the way of that is the jerk or
(07:23):
the hot girl who won't give it away. The jerk.
She's the jerk, you know. But if you really open
up the framing of it and you make the theater bigger,
you know, cinematic, and you go okay. Well, when she
woke up this morning, her hair went one direction and
(07:45):
her calic was doing its thing, and she had to like,
you know, take a shower, brush out her hair, get
a product that's like you know, doing something to her
brain through its skull, and then she had to like
you know, put all kinds of like chemicals on her
face and watch a bunch of YouTube tutorials that she's
been watching since she was fifteen too, like manufacture a
(08:06):
look of natural. And then all of that is like
expenses that she doesn't have, and makeup she's relying on
that she's invested in for like three years, and she's
hoping that all of these things are going to like
pull together the same face she had yesterday. But somehow,
with the humidity and the sweat of the environment of
like a stressful meeting, made her makeup like really set
(08:29):
and she's been working on her body for like a
hundred years and so that she can like you know,
present to patriarchy. She shows up at this bar and
really she's just looking for a good lay with a
good guy who's not going to kill her. Like now
you have an underdog with a much more powerful foe,
but it takes time. You have to develop that. And
(08:50):
so then that was the other obstacle was like, Okay,
there's no time at a bar. I have to win
folks over in ten seconds. I have ten seconds, actly five,
but ten seconds, and I have to work off of
who they see, you know. So then you've got these
comedians who get regulated to storytelling and one person shows
(09:11):
when really the reason why we're doing that is because
to bring everybody the real underdogs that we are in
our lives, we have to go into a story. Yeah,
it's unfamiliar to folks, and so that's what I wanted
to do with this report that I did through Pop
Culture Collaborative was to like really make it clear to
people all of the things that make it impossible to
(09:32):
be funny like your guy friend, and that every time
we are funny like them, that's not revolutionary, we're just
inhabiting patriarchy in a different kind of way, like we
figured out how to assimilate, but it definite leave us.
So yeah, I want to talk about this study on
doing deep dive. I you know, came across obviously you're comedian,
(09:54):
your writer at your podcast host, which we want to
talk about as well, but you're also an activist. I
don't know if that's the word that you use for it,
but you're very much if we're still allowed to say
disrupting oh quotes, you know, like comedy culture, not just
by existing although in that regard as well, but also
specifically by doing this study with this organization that you
(10:16):
just referenced. I'm assumming getting paid to do so and
really looking at not only this issue of like what's
funny for who, but also the pipeline that that ends
up affecting. And I specifically want you to tell us
about it in terms of this idea of tension versus release,
because this is exists in comedy. I don't know if
(10:38):
if people outside of the comedy world think about this equation,
but this feels like kind of an age old comedy
equation that there's tension and then the comedian releases the
tension with the punch line and everybody goes ha ha, yeah,
and you're this seemed like your way in that you
were like, hold up, what makes us all tense is
not the same? Yes, how did they find you? How
did you find them? And how did you decide to
(10:59):
sort of do this and didn't reveal. I met up
for coffee with Bridget Antoinette Evans and Tracy events like
and I complained about comedy for an hour and then
I got a grant. There's really something to be said
for everybody taking an acting class man, because you really
(11:19):
have to get specific about your obstacles and then you
know what, then you can articulate them to people. And
I had the benefit also of being invited to the
Sundance Creative Change Retreat presented by an organization called the
Opportunity Agenda. And I call them the liberal Illuminati, because
I was like, who are you? I want to know them.
You look very powerful to me, and you are everywhere,
(11:44):
but no one knows this, uh. And they brought together
all these folks from all these different areas for activism
and I was there with Harry and come out and
you know, like as peers. And I was like, whoa
hold up, I'm quitting comedy also, and they were like
why and I was like, here's why. And I laid
(12:05):
out for them all my complaints, like I can't do
this because of this, and I can't do that because
of that, and they said, your complaints are analysis. And
I had not pursued academia beyond my bachelor's you know,
so like I never thought about it that way. I
was always just you know, trying to fix what's broken
(12:25):
and it wasn't working and I just was stuck. And
they were like, that's racism, that's institutionalized racism. And I
was like, no way. I mean, this turns back into
the first question to write. I mean it really nick
naming stuff. You know, words are problematic, but words are
also incredibly valuable. When it's like, oh, this weird experience
(12:48):
I'm having that makes me feel like even more other
than than ever, because I feel like I'm having a
different experience than everyone else. That word instantly makes me
feel like, oh, I'm actually having a related experience to
a bunch of p who all feel like they're having
these solo, isolated experiences exactly, and then when I started
talking about it, then people would say things like, oh
my god, I have that. In the medical field, Oh
(13:10):
I have that. As a classical musician, Oh I have that.
You know where we get put in these physicians where
we have to explain the distance between our context and
people's expectation of our context. Say more about that in
terms of like stereotypes or what you mean when you're
an ethnically ambiguous woman and you get up on stage
and the audience wants to know where you're from, and
(13:32):
there's a power dynamic that exists with women that is attention,
that is, you know, I have an expectation, I have
a question, answer it. And when you're a woman, that
power dynamic of like I need something from you, give
it to me exists is normative and subconscious and habitual.
(13:52):
And when you're a woman of color, than the expectation
for people to educate about where you're like, don't just
don't just relieve my tension, but also fill in all
of the gaps of anything I've ever wanted to know
since you're here, if you don't mind exactly exactly, And
especially with liberal audiences, because they believe that it is
(14:13):
their job to learn from difference. They're pre set to
expect that when difference presents itself on stage, they should
learn from difference, and so then that learning kills comedy.
Nobody laughs when they're learning. You can't learn when you're laughing.
You laugh when you get it. You laugh because you
(14:35):
just told me something that I already knew, and I
forgot that I knew it. Oh you're human, I forgot. Sorry,
that's funny. How did I forget that? You know? Oh?
You do that just like me. Oh my god, I
recognize that. But when we're learning, we stop laughing. We
listen when we're actually learning, and you know that experience
of when people are actually listening to you versus when
they're not right. We all know that feeling. So in
(14:58):
comedy like tension. I mean, you ever get a breathless laugh.
It's the worst thing in the world. People have to
go ha ha ha. They have to take a breath
in if that anticipation is not there and someone wants
to agree with you or disagree with you or what
you just said. They think they know where you're going,
(15:19):
but they're not sure. They see a magic tricks about
to happen, and they want to catch it before you
trick them. That has to be there, that tension has
to exist. But what happens for people who are not
sis hetero white men on stage is that it's not
(15:39):
the normative social experience for us to have authorship over
that tension. When we see a white guy on stage
with a mic, we go, oh, what's he gonna do
with that power? And then we're along for the ride.
When I take that mic, then people go, wait, where
are you from? And how did you get here? And
where are your parents? And how did they get here?
(16:00):
And do they approve of what you're saying? And do
I agree that I'm going to let you be in
charge of that? That's a lot Before I opened my mouth,
I mean, this is so genius exactly, And I mean
so then the question, of course, is like, so, what's
the solution so people like you don't quit? I'll say
this because it's never one solution, right, you know, we
say it takes a village. But I think what we
(16:22):
forget about that is it's not just people. It's also institutions.
So it's not just about the people in the audiences,
it's also about the pipelines. It's also about those gatekeepers.
It's also about the metrics that we use to gauge
a laugh. It's also about the way that we determine
whether or not a comedian successful. What are we gonna
do if all of the time the metric for success
(16:44):
is how heartily you laugh at what you already knew
to be true. Yep, we can't move forward real far.
So what I think we have to remember is it's
not always meant to be funny to you. You know,
we're not the every tension romans that it's not always
(17:07):
meant for everybody. Right. So if that's the case, if
it's not good and I and people always say, like,
you know, guy, I'll get a lot of bro comics
who are like, what are we gonna do with comedy
if it's not about laughter? And it's like, okay, I'm sorry,
Gallagher tours. There are comedians making money who aren't funny.
People will survive, the industry will survive, Capitalism will still thrive.
(17:32):
Don't worry. You know, I lost a friendship over Nanette. Oh.
Nanetta is a classic stand up comedy structure. It's fucking stunning. Uh.
And he is a comedian of color and could not
wrap his mind around the fact that if it wasn't
funny to him, it should not have any value to
(17:52):
anybody else, and that that was something that offended me.
I'm scared for you that you have a friend like that.
Well not anymore. I'll tell you why. Nana is a
classic comedic structure. Comedy is a personal essay. You begin
with an argument, you carry it all the way through,
example after example after example, you make a case. It's
not about subplots. It's not about wrapping up you know
(18:13):
what he said or she said or they did. It's
about the argument. So Nnette Show is an argument, you know,
and then too it closes on the highest point of tension.
That's comedy, the mic drop. But the thing is the
celebration for Nanette. What makes it so impactful, which is
a real metric for success in comedy, and what makes
(18:35):
it so revolutionary is that the mic drop comes when
they let the tension release for them and not the crowd.
This is a celebration for me. It lands on you buy.
That's the greatest mic drop of all time. It's fantastic
and it's classic comedy. Okay, we'll be back, Okay, We're back,
(19:05):
and we were talking in the break and I want
to bring this up because this whole idea of tension
and releasing the tension does remind me of, you know,
being a woman, and how much the idea of people pleasing.
I mean, I showed you I have a pin on
my jacket today that's like a little award for not
pleasing everybody, which I almost wear ironically because i feel
(19:28):
like I get through a whole day and I'm like,
oh funk, I pleased everybody I can. I'm trying not
to because that means, you know, but it's a lot
of mental labor, Okay. So on Maslow's hierarchy of needs
is like a pyramid right of like safety at the
physiological level, belonging you know, community and uh esteem and
(19:51):
then self actualization. And so many times folks think that
they're having a conversation at the level of self actualization,
like we're just talking extractly, right, when they don't realize
that for the other person, it's hitting them in a
space of belonging, you know, whether or not they feel
connected to that other person anymore, like you lost your friend, right,
And I think for women are sense of belonging, likability, accommodation.
(20:18):
All those things threatened our belonging, but also belonging for
us as capital, yeah where property, you know, and for
people of color this is even more triggering. So you
know when people say, like, don't be so accommodating, or
you know, don't be so gracious, or you know, don't
try to please everybody, it's like, well, it's not really
(20:40):
always up to me though, And that's also not a
percent of the time a way that I can be
successful institutionally speaking. I mean this on a really practical
level is also why I pushed back as a professional
voice coach on like making fun of girls for vocal
fry yoh yeah, Like, can I admit that sound repeatedly
(21:05):
without break is like a little bit jarring and I
want somebody to breathe a little bit more sure, But
on a much more holistic level, if we're talking about
what's happening societally for that human being trying to make
it in the world and get some of their needs met,
I bet that vocal fries helping them get there. There's
a sense of belonging because boy do they sound like
their peers. There's a sense of safety because they're not
(21:27):
scaring that guy. See. See this is the thing is like,
sometimes I wonder if leadership is its own pronoun. Who wait,
what's like? What if I was just like yeah, will
be like, uh say more because I see so many
(21:50):
women who inhabit leadership. But there's a masculine edge to
it somehow that we have to present and perform to.
And sometimes that's natural to us. It doesn't feel like
a performance, and sometimes it's a performance because it's like,
we all have masculine and feminine energies and that's cool.
But if we're just like ratching up the masculine because
it's inherently coded as more powerful in this world, then
(22:12):
we're never actually finding what female leadership sounds like. And
by the way, that's the point of this podcast. Like
if uh, if an orc came in to tell me
that the company is failing, then I am gonna be
focused on the fact that the company is failing. Like
why does it matter how you present? You know I've
already been hired, you checked my resume, you read my references.
(22:37):
I have been here. I'm here because you have the
stipulated trust in me in this position. So when I
tell you we're screwed and you're in trouble, then everything
moves forward from there. Why is it backward in an
attack on my character? Obviously, logically that makes a lot
of sense, right, Everything else is sexism. You don't like
(22:58):
the package? Why are you looking at the package? And
it's so sexist to examine and evaluate the value of
the package. I want to ask about your podcast Good
Muslimpad Muslim, which recently aired its final episode after five years,
and specifically in terms of how revealing we are publicly,
which is obviously something I'm considering having my own nascent podcast.
(23:19):
But also I see you know, quote unquote influences or
anybody on the interwebs struggling with this and that sense
of like I would like to reveal authentic things about
myself because it feels like I'm finding my community, and
also some of it feels like I'm doing it for
other people and it doesn't like what how do you
(23:40):
figure out what's private? Oh? Yeah, that's a great question
for me. Safety has played a big role in that,
you know, because being an Iranian woman in this country
continues to be a more and more dangerous thing. I
always thought that I didn't have to really be all
that aware of politics. And part of the reason why
I got into comedy ha ha was to escape politics.
I wanted to be able to just be silly, imagine that,
(24:02):
just be funny. And then I realized when I got
invited to this conference and you run, that turned out
I think to be a scam maybe um that I
can't do that. I have to actually keep up, you know,
and know what I'm up against. Uh, speaking of those obstacles,
and that sucks because there are some things that I
want to be able to talk about that I think
are important to talk about, but it just puts me
(24:22):
at a risk that is, you know, um, not worth it.
And on the other hand, you have talked really openly
about a lot of things from your surgery two sexuality exactly.
I was going to say, your reaction to the Pulse
student night club shooting. Yeah, I came out as bisexual.
Part of the blessing and curse of me is that
(24:44):
I have to dialogue it in order to know what
it is that I'm thinking, which can be tough for
folks who care a lot about what people say. You know,
for all that invested, I'm always trying to figure out, well,
is this the word you know, like you said, it's
words are so fluid for me, like they they're they're
so restricative, and you're we're always looking for like is
(25:04):
this the right now? Phrase? I wanted to understood. I mean,
that's why we communicate literally, Yes, is this? Why is this?
How is this? You know? Um? I actually took communications
coaching because I was in a leadership position I got.
I was project manager of a company and I didn't
know what that meant. Was you swallow blame? Well, they
(25:28):
never tell you that, and they promote you. And I
got an evaluation at three sixty evaluation where they said, uh,
you're too tall and too loud, and just because you're
tall and loud doesn't mean when you get you get
what you want. You're a brasive and nobody likes you.
We haven't liked you for the last five years. Okay,
this is mostly women. One guy. It was hilarious as
(25:50):
I got the position because I was scary enough that
I could contend with the one guy. Oh my god,
I mean that's why I was there was none of
them wanted to hold the accountable. But then in the
process of me holding everyone accountable, then it came to
that and I could have left, but I wanted to
know why did this happen? Yeah, and I had a
(26:11):
friend who was doing communications coaching, and I asked her
she could come in and I learned so much and
she taught me that charisma is the ability to speak
to people's strengths and that in times of crisis, we
all think that everyone will show up as their best self,
but really people will show up as their worst self.
It's our most primitive base selves is what's gonna show
(26:35):
up because it's not practiced. We don't practice crisis. And
kind of crisis do you think she's talking about there,
Like when we're in a position of conflict with somebody,
that's what. Because there's there's some like there's some really lovely,
kind of Mr. Rogers type sentiment about how in like
massive you know, typhoon types of people will people will
(26:55):
really like save each other and surprise each other and
strangers end up, you know, being really loving. And you
can point to that, but I think actually what's much
more interesting, because it happens much more regularly for our lives,
is what you're talking about, the kind type of prices
where you're being called on ship and all of your
all of your internal biases come to the surface. Yes, exactly,
not the tsunami, but the tsunami of the soul. Yeah,
(27:18):
the white fragility suit is what's practiced. One of the
other lessons she gave me was I don't have to
say all of the processing part out loud, And she
taught me this phrase, I think you can trust yourself
to blank blank blank. I said that to my actors
(27:39):
all the time, right, It's such a call to instinct, Yeah,
rather than what do you mean by tell me more
about the processing thing? So you know, I was constantly
afraid that I wasn't doing things right, that I was
an accommodating people correctly, and especially after that meeting, it
didn't help my fear of belonging and certainly made it
(27:59):
difficult to hold pop full accountable. But what she was
saying to me was, or what I heard, was that
I can rely on the capabilities that I have already
in place to examine my thoughts as they come up
and take a moment to decide whether or not those
are the things that I want to discuss. And she said,
(28:23):
if you don't know yet, then let the person know
you need some time, trust that they can handle that
you need a pause. And it was such a beautiful
way to put it, because it wasn't like I didn't
think I deserved it. It was that I was afraid
(28:44):
that everything would go awry because there was always such
a sense of urgency. And it's like the other half
of permission to speak is permission to not speak. Yeah, Okay,
writing this tsunami of practical advice, I'd like to ask
you for some tips. I specifically would like to focus
on your experience in front of crowds. I think a
(29:05):
lot of listeners are not necessarily comedians, but they are
having more and more opportunities slash, you know, challenging themselves
into being in public, speaking in public, and you know,
not everybody is like a crowd. That's my sweet spot.
But it feels like you've found that. I mean, I
do love the last paragraph of one of your MPR
(29:27):
pieces that's about Jemma that I pronounce it. This is
about the mass shooting at christ Church. So you know, morning,
you said, and this is coming off of your surgery
for thyroid cancer that made it hard for your neck
to participate in communication. Yeah you said it. Wasn't the
(29:49):
first mass shooting, it wouldn't be the last. So often
tragedy is what brings us together. That it made me
appreciate the ritual of Gemma all the more, which is
Friday gathering. Growing up, we went to mosque every Friday.
Whether enjoy sorrow, grief, or uncertainty. I think it's because
of that tradition that I love performing live so much,
even when it's just with a dozen friends in my
(30:10):
living room, even when it runs me ragged, I love
being there with the crowd. And now I might have
a scar to remind me just how much. Yeah, but
I really I loved a lot about that, obviously, but
specifically I want to talk about that. It's a different
way of envisioning. It's a different theater of the theater
of the relationship with the crowd. So it isn't just like,
(30:31):
oh god, I'm up here and people are looking at me. Yes,
So talk about that, like, how do you create a
sense of like we're all in this together? Well, I
go super like, I dive deep into nature. This is
for me. I go, you're my guest dude. Other people,
(30:54):
this is I'm giving the advice that works for me
I do a deep dive into nature, and I'm like, okay,
what's up meat? Sex? Here? We are these organisms, these bodies, right,
So what are the hierarchies about? And I asked myself
what really is at stake? And I engage with all
the doubt. I always say to my students, the people
(31:17):
I mentor lean into the self doubt, trust the self doubt,
because especially for us, as women, women of color, otherwise voices,
there's so much that we have to just push aside
into subconscious and move forward, you know. And then when
we're called upon to be highlighted, that self doubt has
(31:40):
never had its time in the sun, you know, it's yeah,
So then it's just all anxiety. It's just all fuzz,
you know, And so we have to unpack it, unpack, unpack, unpack.
So I asked myself, what's at steak? What's actually at stake? Well,
I get fired. Is my reputation at steak? You know?
Am I in actual danger? And and if I can
(32:00):
say yes to any of that, then I'll say, well,
then is there another way for me to approach this topic?
Because if that's really true, then let's not do that
to me, you know, And then sometimes I re contextualize
because sometimes my anxiety is the exhilaration and excitement, and
I'm not as practiced in owning and enjoying and embodying exhilaration,
(32:26):
you know, as a woman. For me, it was always
about bottling it up. Bottle it up, push it to
the side. Bottle it up, push it to the side.
Don't be too loud, don't be too you know, you're
too tall, You're too loud. Right, So I'm really practiced
and being small, And so then I say, I'm really exhilarated.
I'm very excited, you know. And then sometimes I think
about the scarcity of experience. How many times will I
(32:49):
have a chance to do this kind of performance. It
means a lot to me, and because I think it's
really important to always lean on our instincts in an
athletic experience. That's the most like primal instinct we have,
you know, it goes back millennia. I feel my quads
and I actually massage my quads and I do like everybody, Yeah,
(33:15):
it's your fight or flight. Think about it. When you bolt,
what's got to kick in your hamstrings? In your quads go?
You know, So I lean into my quads, and for
the lines that I'm the most afraid of, you know,
with a crowd that I find them in my quads,
you know, I just like lunge into them. And then
(33:36):
I remember that the audience is my partner on stage there,
my scene partner, and that they're there to do a
job with me, is to have a good time. And
I speak to their strengths. Yeah, you guys know how
to have a good time. We know how to do this,
We know how to let go. And if they don't know,
(33:57):
then I asked them about it. So you know what
is that about? And people also know what it means
to be a heckler to take up too much stage time.
And so why lean on that? You know you're doing
that thing? Friends and move to the other person, and
I build community, you know, and sometimes I split the
audience in half. The advice that one of my great
mentors w Kmlbell, comedian Emmy winner United States of America
(34:21):
on CNN, I'll be in the spring season, watch it.
He used to say, never let the audience be a
faceless mass, hold them accountable, assign them an opinion, let
them voice that they disagree, but make them do their job.
They're a live crowd for a reason. It's not television.
And I put in every performance I think of something
(34:44):
new that I'm trying to gain some new information. You know,
what if there's more to this joke, What if there's
more to this idea or this premise? What do you
mean about the separating them in half thing? So I'll say,
you know, you guys are amazing over here, but this
side so very conscious, very like out loud, yes, yeah,
very out loud. This side, I don't know what's happening
(35:06):
with you. You folks are with me? Or sometimes I'll
just find the one person who gets it and I'll
alienate everyone else and connect with that one person. Then
what happens is people lean in, and then other people
lean in, and then the person who is making it
a terrible show the whole time makes themselves clear. And
what ends up happening is people walk away going that
(35:27):
was a weird crowd, not you bombed. Yeah, crowd work
well in any presentation. I think people just forget that
the audience is in a relationship with you. They're they're
in a dynamic with you, and if you feel like
they've turned into an evaluative mass then hold them accountable
for that. And if you don't know how to do that,
(35:49):
then those are the things to prepare yourself with. And
you are suggesting for yourself that one of the tools
is to literally ask them. Yeah, because we do for get.
I mean, I coach people in this and you know,
sometimes I'm like, if there's something you don't know about
people up top, and it's not even a hostile crowd
as just you literally you've done a bunch of research,
(36:10):
but like who actually showed up to this I don't
know fundraiser or conference, ask questions, get a show of hands,
or get people to voice. But like the more you know,
the better. But also theater wise, that's a way of saying, like,
you guys are participants, were in a room together, We're
all meet sacks in a room together. Let's like not
pretend we're not exactly. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break,
(36:31):
and then when we come back, we're going to find
out whose voice Zara admires. Okay, we're back, and Zara,
tell us who you chose. Lisa Marie Rollins, Yes, tell
(36:53):
me about her. She's my director for my comedy special
on Behalf of All Muslims a comedy special, and she
she really supported me in the vision for the show.
And I've been following her career for a real long time,
in part because she's amazing, and in part because we
started out together as solo performers in W. Kmal Belle
(37:14):
Solo Performance Workshop. And at that time, I remember she
was producing for him, and the way that she would
hold space and then can be a student with us,
you know, be production manager here and then come sitting
in class at us and then and I um, I
(37:35):
just saw all of the different ways that she engaged
with people, crowds, spaces. She was always thinking about kind
of what's the construct and seeing, you know, what does
she need from it? And how does she give to it?
And I don't know that she necessarily thinks about it consciously.
(37:56):
I just saw how fluidly she moved through it, and
it really struck me and I really admired it. And
then when it came to my show, Oh man, did
I rely on her so much to speak multiple languages
of academia, comedy theater, even you know, philanthropy in the
grant writing process, in addition to just how she held
(38:18):
vision for this medium of stand up comedy, which is
like a singular individual up against the needs of a
theater space that wants, you know, spectacle for its audience live,
you know, not just one person up against the blank.
You know. It also strikes me we're gonna listen to
her in a second, but a lot of her public
(38:39):
work as a playwright and as a writer is about
her as she calls a transracial adoption experience, which means
that she's mixed race, right, and what that did for her,
I'm wondering, you know. It's it's really like the idea
of code switching, which is a really like a well
known trope in certainly an African American culture, because you
(39:03):
have to you you you were raised to feel like
you have to speak differently in different contexts in order
to be taken seriously in different context is something we
actually all do. It's like totally a linguistic thing. We
all talked differently to different people. But it doesn't have
as much of a loaded quality to it when you know,
we aren't in like a less dominant culture and having
to sort of prove ourselves. But I'm sure that's something
that's so front of mine for her. So the way
(39:24):
that you just describe that experience of her being able
to kind of chameleon in various spaces, feels like it
may be something that was like a lifelong skill. Oh,
absolutely absolutely, we're gonna listen role vast. But there was
something she said in here. She was being interviewed about
her writing style and like her relationship to the whole, Like,
you're only a legit writer if you carve out four
(39:46):
hours a day and it's the same exact four hours
every day, and like, you know, the sort of discipline
side of being a writer. And this was her response
as a person who acknowledges how all the aspects of
my life informed mus help as a writer, my teaching work,
my activist work, my racial positionality, all of those things
(40:08):
inform who I am. It's part of the feeling of
my creative well. And so this notion that I just
have to be sitting all day and outputting without any
kind of mental, spiritual, physical intake was not right for me.
When I'm hearing her voice, she's on like a really
technical level. She's using a lot of pitch. She does
(40:29):
a little bit of a special kind of upspeak that
isn't like I end all of my thoughts with a
question accidentally, but rather it's like an in the middle
of a long thought, like I'm about I'm saying the
first half of it so that then you have the
payoff at the end of it, which is like a
kind of upspeak that we all do that we should
do because it's I mean, I'm putting in quotes, but
like it's it's good storytelling. The two main things that
(40:52):
I feel when I'm listening to her speak just really
really technically is one that she's using pitch and things
like you know what I was just describing that are
classic kind of storytelling modes, like i have a long
and complicated thought, but I'm going to take care of
you as I go through it a and be there's
like there's there's like a motion in it, like you
(41:14):
can see her voice almost like cracked at this one
moment and she didn't give a fuck, but like there.
You know, how we talk about things that matter to
us in a way that sounds like they matter to
us is something we've all, in certain ways been kind
of trained out of. This is part of why I
think vocal fry exists, because it's like it's waysy to
kind of hide behind like whatever, I don't really care
(41:34):
like this kind of thing, and as soon as you
put breath behind it, and then you have to acknowledge like, Okay,
my voice kind of wavered when I said that, because
I actually care, and that's something that all of us,
you know, I have absolutely this very weak dealt with Shoot,
I hear myself caring in my voice. Well, that's awkward.
I have to push through and just trust that it
(41:57):
would be even more I mean, you know, it would
be a different kind of awkward if I tried to
sound as flat and generic as possible, Like it would
save me in terms of my my embarrassment, but it
would not save me at all in terms of actually
getting across what I'm trying to get across and like
share a real connection with a human being. And we're
you know, part of working on our voices about like
(42:18):
prioritizing that, prioritizing human real human connection over saving face.
Mm hmmm, saving face. We know how to do. I
mean a lot of us at least there is that
sense of like whatever, as long as I sort of
don't really show up in a room, no one can
make fun of me. Yes, that's fine, that's fine, but
obviously that will not get us our dreams. That's me
on a Friday night. Yeah. Anyway, when I was saying
(42:41):
all that, you were like nodding because it feels like
it's sort of yeah, because I mean it points, it pinpoints,
like all the things that I was so drawn to
that I also wanted to emulate, you know, because of
course there's like code switching that we do right. And additionally,
there was a way that she held space in a room,
(43:04):
navigating how she engaged from what she needed. And I'm
especially when we met as a comedian and as a
young comedian, I'm so accustomed to accommodating the needs of
a crowd and always being high and always being up
here and always rallying, you know, um, and that space
(43:28):
of you know, unwavering liability. It was so different to inhabit,
you know, a different engagement. It's like a real gamble
in the moment, and the payoff is so much better
than if you hadn't taken the gamble. But why does
it feel scary? Yes? And I think that's everything is
seeing somebody achieve it is that really for me what
(43:52):
made her a role model and how I moved through
these artistic spaces. I love that. Thank you for bringing
her in and for letting us know better. Thank you. Yeah,
they'll be info about her in the show notes. Thank
you for being here, thank you for having me. Thank
you for the permission. You're welcome. Thank you to Zara
(44:13):
for coming in. You can find out more about her
in the show notes or on our website Permission to
Speak pod dot com. Also, you can go to Permission
to Speak pod dot com if you have any awesome
quotes you'd like me to read at the top of
the episodes, and if you have any questions, I will
do and ask me anything episode from time to time,
and I want to know what is getting in the
(44:33):
way of your voice. You can also send d M
s or voice messages to our instagram at Permission to
Speak Pod, where we're posting a bunch of content and
please join the community. Thanks as well to Sophie Lichterman
and the team at iHeart Radio, to Megan Read, to
my family and cohort, and to all of you. We're
(44:55):
recording this podcast in the I Heart Radio studios in Hollywood,
on land used to belong to the Tongva indigenous tribe,
and you can visit U s d a C dot
us to learn more about honoring native land. Permission to
Speak is a production of I Heart Radio and Double
Vision Executive produced by Katherine Burke Canton and Mark Canton.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, listen on the
(45:16):
ihart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your
favorite shows.
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