“Halal in the Family”: The Sitcom We Need
By Sarah Larson
The New Yorker
A week ago, at the Comic Strip Live, an Upper East Side comedy club decorated with portraits of Dick Tracy and Dagwood Bumstead, Aasif Mandvi, the actor, writer, and former Senior Muslim Correspondent for “The Daily Show,” hosted the latest edition of “The Big Brown Comedy Hour.” The comedy night, created in 2010 by Dean Obeidallah, who also appeared on the bill, features standup by comedians of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage; the audience was diverse, identifying, via applause and crowd work, as Arab, Pakistani, Indian, Palestinian, Iranian, French, Moroccan, Asian, black, and white. “I think it’s important for Muslims to vote in this election, for obvious reasons,” Mandvi said at the top of the show. The audience clapped. “Whether you’re a Middle Eastern Muslim and you’re going to vote for Bernie, or you’re a South Asian Muslim and you’re going to vote for Hillary, or whether you’re a member of isis and you’re going to vote for Trump.” This killed. A joke about sharia law—Americans don’t want it, and Muslim Americans really don’t want it—also went over big. The atmosphere in the room, as the night went on, was of the usual comedy-club eagerness to laugh coupled with a palpable joy at what could be laughed about. “I’m glad some white people are here,” the Sikh comedian Manvir Singh said during his set. “Otherwise, it would be one big family gathering.”
“The creator of ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie,’ is here, from Canada,” Obeidallah said. Zarqa Nawaz’s show, which ran on the CBC from 2007 to 2012, was about a Muslim community in rural Saskatchewan. “There were no Muslim terrorists on that show. They were all, like, human beings. I hope we can get American TV shows with Muslims that are not terrorists,” Obeidallah said. President Obama said something similar, in February, at the Islamic Society of Baltimore: “Our television shows should have some Muslim characters that are unrelated to national security.” Well, there is such a show, and there should be more of it. It’s called “Halal in the Family,” and it stars Aasif Mandvi. Last Thursday, it won a Peabody-Facebook Futures of Media Award for excellence and innovation in digital storytelling.
“Halal in the Family,” a series of comedic Web shorts that came out last year, is a satire of American sitcom tropes, with a plucky theme song (“We promise there’s no plan / to change the way you live or how you pray / Because we’re just here to obey! Your various laws and local ordinances”) and a laugh track that’s “Married . . . with Children” loud. It’s about a suburban all-American family of four: Aasif (Mandvi) and Fatima (Sakina Jaffrey) and their teen-age kids, Whitney (Shoba Narayanan) and Bobby (Nicky Maindiratta). Aasif, wearing the ugliest, most exuberant Cosby sweater imaginable, is the show’s Archie Bunker figure, spouting anti-Muslim bigotry that his beleaguered family must constantly react to. In a phone interview, Mandvi told me, “The whole joke is that he so is wanting to not be seen as Muslim, because he wants to be accepted, and he wants to be seen as just a regular American, that in his regular-Americanness he actually ends up being more much racist toward Muslims. And in doing that you get to highlight the absurdity of racism and Islamophobia.”
In an episode called “B’ully,” his daughter is bullied online, via a photoshopped picture of her wearing a turban and driving a taxi. “That is terrible!” Aasif exclaims. “We are not Sikhs!” Aasif invites the bully over and teaches her how to bully more effectively, showing her racist caricatures that he considers more accurate, as well a threatening real-life anti-Muslim Facebook post by a gun-toting Tennessee politician. In a “A Very Spooq’y Halloween Special,” Aasif, in order to win a neighborhood competition and a gift certificate to the Cheesecake Factory, decorates the house and yard like a haunted terrorist training camp. What could scare white people more? This plan backfires: a crowd of protestors forms outside, chanting; they think he’s created a mosque. Aasif is outraged. “A mosque?” he says. “Why would I build a mosque? I’m not trying to cause any trouble!”
Mandvi is particularly well suited to this canny, crabby, subversive role: as a performer, he is quick, sharp, focussed, ready to be cantankerous, with an edge of righteous anger that feels volatile enough to go in any direction; he’s also warm and energetic, and clearly delighted by absurdity. Watching him parade around in his garish sweater—“I got this at Urban Outfitters!”—is enjoyable in itself. The show’s complex interplay of irony and agony is as formidable as that garment’s interweaving of yarn and leather.
Mandvi, who was born in Bombay, grew up in England and the United States. He describes his early life with observant humor in his 2014 book of essays, “No Land’s Man: A Perilous Journey Through Romance, Islam, and Brunch,” which is especially entertaining in audiobook form, read by the author with brio and wit. Mandvi watched “All in the Family” reruns as a teen-ager in the eighties, after learning about it via “Archie Bunker’s Place”; before he moved to the United States, he watched analogous shows in the U.K. “ ‘All in the Family’ was very similar to, and actually based on, on a British show called ‘Till Death Do Us Part,’ where you’ve got this kind of crusty British guy who is racist and always gets his comeuppance in some way for his own bigotry,” he told me. “There was also a show called ‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ about a white British couple and a black West Indian couple living next door to each other, and how they dealt with their own racism. There was another one called ‘Mind Your Language,’ a sitcom about an English-as-a-second-language class. They had an Indian character, a Chinese woman. It was the first show I’d seen with a multicultural cast. ‘All in the Family’ felt like those shows, dealing with race and culture in the ways English shows were doing as well.”
“Halal in the Family” began as a segment on “The Daily Show,” in 2011, inspired by Katie Couric’s suggestion that there should be a Muslim version of “The Cosby Show.” (This, of course, was in a more Cosby-naïve era.) In the segment, Mandvi consults with Dr. Alvin Poussaint. (“So we should portray Muslims as good people,” Mandvi says. “Yes!” Poussaint says. “Genius,” Mandvi says, writing in his notebook.) He makes a sitcom called “The Qu’osby Show”—jauntily similar to “Halal,” sweater included; the family drinks pork juice and dances to Toby Keith—and then shows it to a group of average Americans, who react badly and find it unrealistic. “You gotta have that closet terrorist or something,” a rough-looking white guy says. “Uncle Rayib or something who came over. And he’s, you know, a Bedouin, and he lives in the basement in a sandbox or something, with a goat.” Mandvi reminded me that “All-American Muslim,” a reality show on the Learning Channel showing the workaday lives of Muslim Americans, had met with similar reactions. (Watch the “Daily Show” clip and you can hear Megyn Kelly discussing the “controversy,” with concern.) “People were saying, ‘This is not real, this is propaganda, because it goes against our prejudices,’” Mandvi said. “I did a piece about it on ‘The Daily Show’ because Lowe’s pulled its advertising.” In it, Mandvi, with Aasif-like glee, describes Lowe’s as a one-stop terrorism-supplies superstore.
Mandvi co-created the “Halal in the Family” Web series with Miles Khan, who was the co-creator of the sketch on “The Daily Show.” “In order to get an idea of what we wanted to talk about, we reached out to Muslim advocates and various Muslim organizations and legal organizations that are dealing with this kind stuff in courts: infiltration of mosques, illegal surveillance, cyberbullying,” Mandvi told me. “And we used those as issues to wrap this sitcom format around.” They made the shorts on a shoestring budget, intending to make more in the future. “We launched it on Funny or Die, and it became incredibly popular,” Mandvi said. “It was crazy. Everybody was suddenly talking about it. It made me realize, Oh, there’s a real appetite for this kind of content.”
He wants the next incarnation to be for television, in a form that allows the show to be “much more subversive and broader.” How so? “Maybe they have a dog named Donald Trump, and maybe he’s a complete Islamophobe,” he said. Aasif Qu’osby, Mandvi told me, would align with Trump politically. “He’d be the first one to be like, ‘We shouldn’t let any more Muslims into the country until we figure out what’s going on!’ You know? He would be the first one to get on board with Donald Trump with that, until he realizes what that consequence of that is. And then his wife would be like, ‘You do realize that that means that your mother cannot come and visit you?’ ‘Oh hold on, that’s a different story.’ You know? He kind of speaks the knee-jerk reaction of the culture: ‘That’s right, we do need to fix that problem!’ Until you realize the nitty-gritty of it, and that the problem is not as simple as just getting outraged.”
Source: www.newyorker.com