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Laughing Matters: Comedy’s Serious Role in Human Rights

The MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with The Second City and Pillars Fund, hosted a conversation about the innovative ways comedy and pop culture are being used to engage a range of audiences in difficult discussions about race, gender, equity, and belonging. The conversation included an in-depth exploration of the power of comedy for social equity and a stand-up performance from comedian Yasmin Elhady. The panel featured people and organizations supported through MacArthur’s Journalism and Media Program, which aims to strengthen U.S. democracy by supporting just and inclusive news and narratives that inform, engage, and activate Americans to build a more equitable future. Moderator: Kelly Leonard, Vice President of Creative Strategy, Innovation and Business Development, The Second City Panelists: Caty Borum, Executive Director, Center for Media & Social Impact, American University; Co-Founder/Director, Yes, And … Laughter Lab and GoodLaugh Crystal Echo Hawk, CEO and President, IllumiNative Yasmin Elhady, Comedian

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Look at you beautiful people! There's no one in the front row, proving my theory that people truly fear powerful women. Where are y'all? You're so far away. I welcome you to sit in the front, but it's okay if you don't. I'm Arij Mikati, I'm the Managing Director of Culture Change at an organization called Pillars Fund. We are a community-based grant making organization that seeks to amplify the leadership narratives and talents of Muslims in the United States and the UK, because we believe deepl
y that storytelling is one of the most powerful tools that we have to transform our world. It offers each of us a mirror where we can see ourselves and a window where we can imagine the worlds beyond ourselves. Our signature program at Pillars in the culture change arm is our Pillars Artist Fellowship, a program in partnership with Netflix, Amazon Studios, and Oscar winner Riz Ahmed, that supports emerging Muslim screenwriters and directors to reach their greatest creative aspirations. And that'
s why we're so excited to be here with all of you tonight and our partners and collaborators to talk about why and how comedy matters. But before we get to that, it's one of my personal strongest beliefs that marginalized folks deserve frivolity, we deserve to laugh. So what better way to kick this thing off than with a little comedy set by one of the funniest human beings I know. I'm super excited to introduce her: Yasmin Elhady is a comedian and attorney, whatever, she's super lazy, who has to
ured nationally and internationally. She's performed at the Kennedy Center and was featured on NBC's True Story with Ed Helms and Randall Park in 2022. She's also appeared locally on WSA9 with Rhys Waters, NPR, Netflix is a Joke Radio on Sirius XM, and the Washington Post. Pretty impressive. She was also named a 2022 Yes, And Laughter Lab finalist for comedy and social justice and, most importantly, to me she is one of the most loyal and wonderful friends I've ever had the privilege to have. So
please welcome Yasmin Elhady [Music] [Applause] Thank you! The checks in the mail, thank you. Hi everybody! I want to first start by saying that I am one of the good ones. you know what I mean by that I am a security clearance I check out I'm half Egyptian half Libyan hold the Applause please I'm an asylum Seeker in this country um and I just want to first start off by saying that uh this is not English you're like oh my God what does your purse say what does it say and I'm like it obviously say
s death to America they're like what I'm like chill it says Satan I'll take it off for now just my name yes mean yeah I know that's my name just my name in Arabic so I remember my worth um when everyone else forgets it so I'm an asylum Seeker in this country uh and my dad was kind of like a teeny tiny a tad bit like a in the Gaddafi regime right like what does that taste like is that cumin no it's tyranny dictatorship so my dad was a cabinet minister in the Qaddafi regime not Loki High key yeah
I know cringe awkward I know but if you could just stay with me we're on the right side of History I told him an asylum Seeker so my dad morally abstain against the Gaddafi regime and then moved to six countries to get to the freedom and safety of these United States if you're looking for freedom and safety in the United States a place that is very open to Muslims and Arabs Alabama is where I grew up it's also the sound of my soul um when I wanted to unsubscribe from that movie so if you want to
know why I sound like a white woman from Connecticut it's because she taught me English as a second language [Music] thank you Miss Mooney the Yankee but when I'm down there I just turned it right on it's no big deal you know sometimes I'll just mess with people I'll call dominoes hey hey nominos just want a three-top and pizza okay and then they come to the door and they're like bless your heart blink twice if you want me to save you sweetie I'm like I'm not one of you I just playing one on th
e phone give me this pizza so when we first came uh to the U.S my parents were broke uh they were just trying to make ends of eat and they knew I needed to learn English fast because of the Alabama thing that they did to me so they put me in um like the free ESL have you guys heard of it's called the USA Network my parents put me for the USA Network because they thought I'd learn English faster they were like red white blue do you boo go go I was a six of six kids so by the time they got to me t
hey're like raise yourself we're so tired seven in the morning it was WWF wrestling with the grades okay give it up for Hulk Hogan Randy Savage but the Hitman heart even the Undertaker a little goth but he didn't have the love of his mother so I could relate oh my God every morning I was hopped up ready to get on the bus I was like mama get me on the bus she was like reduce just please minimize we just made it to America don't mess this up every single time I didn't make too many too many moves
she's like Stop Dancing for money on stage I'm like that's not what I'm that is not what I'm doing mom so I'm like I know I'm gonna connect as a kindergartner just get me to school I know how to be an American she's like please don't embarrass me you do it a lot it's very judgmental it's adorable it's your cute advice anyways so I got on the bus and I got to kindergarten and there was a cute little girl there named Teresa so I did what was natural I wanted to connect I got on top of the desk and
I body slammed her to the floor and poor Teresa was like why husband why I was like I don't know I can't hear you oh yeah I was sent to the principal's office where I was properly diagnosed with ADHD and they just kept making but they're like oh my God Ellen you're doing so good yeah until third grade came around and uh my teacher she was like I need to get your daddy in here you're a nuisance I was like I am not a new student she's like get your daddy in here you better listen Okay PTA request
s and so I went home and I told my dad who at that time was working two jobs I was like Bubba look um the PTA needs you to come to school he's like PTA is this a disease that the kids are getting at school idea parent teacher Association if you could just please conform that would be good all the other white parents are doing it he was like who said I have to be there I'm like no no one said you had to be there he's like you're gonna owe me I'm like okay I'm eight I will work on it I will so he'
s like fine but my dad his big thing was he tried to make me like proud of who I was he'd always be like just do it be unique do the right thing just do it I'm like that's a Nike ad Bubba he's like yeah but sometimes corporate gets it right so he shows up and then there's Miss Charney she's look at him she's like Mr um ID mahuna duded maimonides mayonnaise whatever sir it does not even matter your daughter Yasmine El Hootie and the Blowfish she she is a real Joy she is but she's also a challenge
isn't she she just talk talks has lots of opinions asks a lot of questions he's like wait wait lady is this a problem for the women in her country what I am from the women have lots of opinions they ask a lot of questions when I don't know something I just nod like this she's like Mr Magoo I don't think you understand she is a real nuisance hey look there and he goes she's not new student no she you might as well and I I think she needs to be medicated he looks like he's like look lady you ment
ioned a lot of letters what are her grades like she's like they're straight Acer that is not the point he's like no no that's the entire point then it got really low so I can make eye contact with him he's like I swear to God if you waste my time with these white people ever again is it gonna be a lot of caucasians in your way just do it be unique just do it step over them I was like okay that's really good that's good advice Dad thanks uh my dad has a sick sense of humor um because of the Gadda
fi thing uh so all right so I I married a man from Afghanistan because I didn't have enough trouble in my life right I need more trials I was like Arab in Alabama I need another Afghanistan it's a triple A rating in my house okay the kids are a quarter Egyptian a quarter Libyan and a half Afghan which I nearly call them Afghan we'll call their blood volume we'll call it Freedom Fighter it's fine um it's a lot my dad jokes around he's like hey I know they're acting crazy they're a little bit Gadd
afi a little bit Taliban eh no actually you can't say that about your grandson dad at the airport kind of bored they were born knocked down don't keep knocking them down [Music] kids are a lot the kids are a lot uh I've got ADHD it's my cute advice um and when you have kids you know they they kind of they're like a mirror to who you are right like when you're in a relationship that's a mirror to you as well like all your insecurities all your flaws which you quickly deflect onto the other person
right like I don't hate I hate you I actually you hate you hate yourself but with your kids there's no running away like if you have a problem it's you that's you staring at you so my kids are flinging themselves off of the furniture and but my dad has become a softie in his old age he's like don't touch him I'm like Dad I have to catch him he's like no no no don't break his spirit my dad I have to break his fall he's gonna break his skull he's like no no he will learn you become all woke he's
like don't even raise your voice at him don't say a negative word it would psychologically damage him I'm like yeah I know uh my kids I told you their blood volume is pure evil uh they they were born pretty white passing can't lie it piss me off to answer your question yeah I look like this but in Alabama okay so you think I was bullied a little bit have some scars so imagine here's these two kids in my house just staring at me like having your oppressors at home staring at you with their beady
little privileged eyes [Music] don't worry well my son turned two little guy he browned up like a rotisserie chicken like the melanin kicked in the Afghanistan part just really came too like an Ariana Grande before and after but natural hahaha that's a messed up joke like I do I like her thank you thank you so I mean I'm trying to raise them in DC that's where I'm based uh where there's a lot of respect for diversity and money um so I feel like well right yeah I feel like they'll be okay we were
like oh my God what language do your kids speak like the United Nations I'm like I don't know something useful probably Mandarin world domination language that's what they are going to speak yeah um so the other day uh I was I was thinking about how different we're being raised so I was raised at a completely different situation my parents by the way still live in Huntsville Alabama guys yeah and I'm like why my mom is like the judgmental one she's like you're so dumb like well what are you tal
king about she's like I don't know you're not as smart as me I don't know how to say it I'm like Mom how do you survive in Alabama she gets stopped by the police all the time by the way because she's gorgeous she has like a teeny tiny bit of road rage yeah I taught her it was this finger so she didn't get arrested but surprisingly shockingly crazy how many times you get stopped I'm like Mom how do you get out of it every time she's like so simple when the police come by they say ma'am and I just
say no hable English essay Mom no one believes that you speak Spanish she's like it's fine works like a charm so I tried it so during the Trump years I got stopped seven times in six months in Virginia I had never had a ticket before a coincidence I think not and I got stopped and they were going to suspend my license and the cop stopped me and I just started making noises because I thought I couldn't do an offensive accent right so he he stopped me he's like man do you know why I stopped you a
nd I was like [Music] he's like are you having a seizure man I'm like no no sir it's just really hard to drive should I even be driving I'm just a little girl like man what do you do for a living I was like I'm a lawyer then he asked me he's like what do you think about President Trump I was like is there an option to just simply get the ticket sir and avoid I'm just gonna get your badge number so my mom has been really amazing at sniffing out the races she's really good at it she just does not
engage okay or pretends like she can't speak English which is pretty creative and so we were in a Tyson's Virginia Marshalls this is a real story right after Trump was elected about a year in and this woman comes up to us with a name tag pretty official my mom beelines it away from me as quick as possible so I should have I should have known This Woman's like hi hey hi my name is Jill I work here what are you what are you doing how can I help you like I'm just getting some black and brown boots
no big deal thank you and she's like black and brown boots who'd you vote for I was like I don't I'm so sorry it's like a privacy poll fake Booth thing I don't talk to strangers about that I'm gonna get these boots and skedaddle and she's like I voted for Trump I was like oh that's cool that's awesome and I could see my mom looking at me through the clothing rack like it's stupid it's stupid she was like I just feel like he's protecting the Constitution he just really cares about America he's pu
tting America First he's making it great again and I was like cool I'm just gonna get these boots and not talk to you again okay and she's like well I just think there's too many Muslims here don't you [Music] I was like well Jill I'm actually one of them so I would have to patently disagree with you about too many Muslims things she's like no no you're not one of them I was like I'm sorry no I I'm definitely she's like no you're not as deep as them I'm not as philosophical as other Muslims like
I can't discuss tolsoi or poetry yeah I'm not very smart is that what you mean what does this mean she's like no no you're not as deep as them and then she winked at me and pointed to her face I was like are you saying that I'm not black enough to be Muslim and she was like exactly and in that moment I was like [ __ ] I have white privilege only my friends in Alabama Could See Me Now thank you everyone my name is [Applause] [Music] that was awesome wasn't it thank you so much Yasmine um so hell
o everyone thanks so much for being here um I think I'm kind of the palette cleanser between the two main courses so I'm going to make this as quick as possible my name is Jen humke and I am with the journalism and media program at the MacArthur Foundation and we support many of the people that you're going to see on stage today we're very proud supporters of them and I also wanted to be up here just to welcome you uh to the event this evening because this is the first uh public event that we ar
e holding to Chicago since pre-covet so it's kind of a new experience for us so thank you for being here when I say uh sending the MacArthur Foundation course um so very quickly for those of you who don't know the MacArthur Foundation we are a global Grant making institution and we are headquartered here in Chicago we make grants totaling about 250 250 million dollars excuse me do organizations all around the globe working on a range of issues and we fund them you know to help make the world a b
etter place to make it more peaceful to make it more inclusive to make it more Equitable the journalism and media program of which I am part and which is bringing you today's event is National and scope and we support groups and activities across the country working to strengthen our democracy by ensuring that everyone has access to accurate and credible and dependable information and knowledge and that all of us have a voice in our democracy and all of us have the ability to influence and shape
our culture shape the institutions and the policies that govern us and believe it or not comedy is actually part of that um I also want to give a round of thanks to a number of people so please bear with me first of all I want to thank the pillars Fund in Second City for co-hosting this event with us I couldn't think of better partners a special thank you to Aries and her colleagues Kalia and Kashif who weren't able to make it this evening but please send them my regards I also want to thank Ke
lly and Kelly so two Kelly's from Second City female Kelly and male Kelly for making it possible for us to host this event in this amazing space so thank you second City [Music] and I also want to thank my colleagues at MacArthur that made tonight happen and they made it look really easy and seamless and I know they did a lot of hard work behind the scenes and that's Beth bosta Michael Venegas Shane Perdue Stephen Hildebran and Sean harder so thank you to them I would also be remiss if I didn't
introduce you to to two of my co-conspirators at the MacArthur Foundation in the journalism and media program Kathy M who is our director I can't see anyone but I know she's here she's over there and Lauren Pabst who is a senior program officer and the journalism and media program so huge thanks and finally I have the really great pleasure of introducing our moderator tonight Mr Kelly Leonard and I know in this room he barely requires an introduction um but he I'm gonna do it anyway he is curren
tly vice president of creative strategy Innovation and Business Development here at Second City he started his career here at Second City in 1988 eventually becoming producer and then after that Executive Vice President and he served in that position through 2015. he has produced hundreds of original reviews with talents such as Stephen Colbert Tina Fey Keegan Michael Key Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler so you know no big deal right um he also co-leads a new partnership with the booth school at the
University of Chicago that studies Behavioral Science through the lens of improvisation in 2015 he published a book called yes and which received rave reviews from Vanity Fair in Washington Post he also hosts a podcast which all of you should subscribe to if you don't already called getting to yes and I believe actually tonight's event is going to eventually be broadcast via his his podcast and that podcast features conversations with Visionary writers thinkers and doers who are using creativity
to challenge conventional business approaches so I think there is nobody better to be leading Us in this conversation this evening about comedy and social change that Mr Kelly Leonard so please come out on stage thank you hey everybody Welcome to Second City how are y'all doing excellent I don't know about left-wing audiences I know I mean like you know we have a thing at Second City too which is it's sometimes like the people who are doing the good sometimes don't laugh as hard but this feels
like a pretty pretty good audience so far so I mean we're gonna go for it all right let me introduce our panel uh Katie Borum is the executive director of the center for media and social impact at American University in Washington DC she is the co-founder and director of the yes and laughter lab and the author of many books most recently her book The Revolution will be hilarious Katie come on out [Music] your mic is in your seats you can turn it on uh Crystal Echo Hawk is the founder and executi
ve director of illuminative the first and only National native LED organization focused on changing the narrative about native peoples on a mass scale Crystal come on out [Applause] and you've met Yasmine El Haiti she's a comedian an attorney who has toured both nationally and internationally and she currently works as the chief of staff to the director for the executive office of immigration review it's an amazing group right [Applause] all right we will discuss many things and I think what I w
ant this to be too is is free flowing so if you have ideas you want to jump on you don't need to wait for me to queue though I do Katie want to start with you so you're I think you're your origin story so where you start in the industry right to the academic career to the book that you've just written I think sort of illustrates why we might be here today right can you tell us about that thank you Kelly hi everyone thank you so much for coming how great was yes yes I mean can you even believe an
yway um I will start by saying Kelly that the last time I realized this on the way here um the last time I was in Chicago talking about a book I was with you yep and I was also with the MacArthur Foundation and it was March 2020 and it was the beginning and end of my very first book tour it was very sad so I might be bad luck I don't know I'm sorry I don't hear a person in the fifth row coughing uncontrollable yes yes so anyway um yeah so that was in 2020 and so I wrote a new book uh the revolut
ion will be hilarious which tells a little bit more of the origin story but I appreciate that start and um I think it connects to two of my favorite women who are sitting next to me which is such a joy um so I was a producer for the legendary Norman Lear for quite a while in Los Angeles I was a producer and a philanthropy director and what we were doing with that work was really leveraging the power of entertainment and comedy of course anyone who doesn't know he is you can Google him later not
now he's a legend but um he's sort of the progenitor of the idea that you can really interrogate public affairs issues and really what's going on in our lives that we might find too taboo to talk about that you can incorporate that into television comedy and actually not sacrifice the humor and and sort of have it be a spark of conversation so we were leveraging that kind of work for all kinds of things namely voter engagement at the time and so I always like to start with that because I think t
he DNA of Norman Lear and his great spirit and his imagination and truly he's a guy that really doesn't think that anything is impossible also also it's nice to be professionally socialized around someone like that um so I like to say that my DNA and comedy like comes by me honestly but years later so I've been working in media and social change as a scholar and as an activist as a writer as a filmmaker I've basically done everything a person can do in the intersection of entertainment and socia
l change but years after those Norman years I was again working on yet another project that was trying to get people to think critically in in this instance it was a project about global development the Millennium development goals I don't know where the public health people are but very sexy you know the world's most wicked terrible problems extreme poverty and so the challenge at the time was is there another storytelling mechanism by which we can get people to engage in issues that are inhere
ntly too dark and complicated to actually think about and so a very long story short I produced a documentary two-part series with Hassan Minaj before a second before he was famous I like to say it's like he got The Daily Show like four months after our documentary came out um but anyway so this project was called stand-up planet and basically the log line is a stand-up comedian from the US goes in search of the funniest comedians in the developing world and follows their jokes into the social i
ssues of their lives and then um I what happened in that project was uh I got a small Grant to do a research project to actually understand how audiences might have engaged with that material differently when they were exposed to a comedic intervention compared to what we think of as sort of the traditional way to tell those stories long-form journalistic which by the way yes to that also I'm never saying these ideas are in competition um and that study led to a huge research agenda and I kind o
f sat back and I thought there's so much that we're missing when we think about human rights work and social change work and entertainment when we have decided sort of on mass that comedy is a little bit too scary or risky to think about when we think about engaging in dire social problems I thought that was a mistake because we've always known that comedy is a source of catharsis and resilience and community building and representation and a way to show our solidarity as fellow humans but I rea
lize that no one was going to believe me based on my sort of anecdotal feelings in my Norman Lear story um to actually go through you know to support that proposition without research so we started a very big research agenda at the center for media and social impact that I'm so proud of this this journey has been actually 10 years since we started that documentary and did the research and it led to my first book called comedian and an activist walk into a bar that's such a funny title it's reall
y funny for academic publishing um it's like hilarious it crushes right of course it totally crushes right it has a colon and then the other stuff is not funny um and then my new book is called the revolution will be hilarious colon comedy for social change and Civic power but here's the the bottom line I will stop here Kelly in case you're starting to panic if you have panic in your eyes no I'm never gonna stop talking um why that's relevant to I think why we're all here and how we share this C
ommon Thread together and these are of course two ladies that I've worked with quite a bit is um in doing that research what I realized very deeply so the research was designed to ask and answer exactly how does comedy work for audiences and culturally when it comes to encouraging us to think about communities that have been dehumanized or misrepresented or sometimes not seen at all how does comedy help us deal with issues that are taboo and painful and complicated and so the research goes into
all of that but the most important piece of this I think beyond the fact that there are not books that help attempt to try to prove that point is that we really wanted to create models to actually bring Comedians and human rights people together to actually co-create comedy once we knew how meaningful comedy is as a force for social change and equity and justice why would we want to just hold that knowledge in books and articles and so we launched a couple of things one is called the yes and lau
ghter lab which yes mean was a winner of last year where we basically um work with an attempt to leverage our own relationships to try to put more power in the hands of comedians who are telling brilliant lived experiences that we haven't seen as much because the entertainment industry has long had a problem I don't know what you mean what do you mean by that oh my God you know what I'm no one wants me to talk longer so everybody knows what I'm talking about and uh and then we launched another p
rogram in the Yasin laughter lab is this incredible program that now is this network of comedians across the country who are doing really incredible comedy work and we build relationships and power with um entertainment industry and social justice groups and also a program called good laugh which we launched last year where we bring Comedians and organizations together to co-create Comedy together I'm one of those first programs was with Crystal Echo Hawk who is a superstar social justice leader
I describe her as one of the most important indigenous leaders of Our Generation do you know I say that about you okay well you'll buy me a drink um anyway and designed to co-create Comedy for Civic power and and social justice so um it's a real honor to be here to be able to tell that story because the book tells the research but the book also tells the stories about what happens when you actually leverage comedy in that way and don't sacrifice the humor that's the most important thing that I
want to say on the Second City stage is that no one is trying to make crappy comedy that's not funny because it doesn't work that's in the book yeah we had this conversation backstage uh Peter McGraw who's also an academic who studies comedy uh says that people are interested in hot tea or cold tea they don't want warm tea and I think that's very true with regard to Comedy Crystal okay I was thinking about what I wanted to ask you first so my wife Ann is a tenured professor of comedy and when sh
e is teaching some of the differences between stand-ups and improv comedians for improv comedians she talks about the fact that they do perspective taking they take suggestions from the audience and create scenes and what stand-up comics have to do is especially in the first five minutes of their act talk about perspective giving so they have to teach the audience how to watch them and often it is through the things and the struggles they've gone through that's what you did and I was interviewin
g Kevin Cruz on my podcast who's a historian who has a terrific book called myth America and it's a bunch of essays about the various myths in America and one of them is by a guy named Arie Kellman and he starts it by quoting Rick Santorum wow we all know where this is going uh who who says quote we birthed a nation from nothing end quote [Music] and I'm curious in terms of doing a bit of research on you where storytelling is really important and being seen is really important and it strikes me
that that in many ways seeing through the comic lens is a little bit dangerous very vulnerable and and so probably is why it's worth it what do you think wow there's a lot in there um I mean I'm happy you know I think one and I'll back up but um I'm proud to say that illuminative was part of the reason why Rick Santorum got fired from CNN over those um and it's one of the ways that we use comedy right I mean you know it was to see the the glory of white supremacy roll off this man's tongue right
um but then to see how CNN propped it up and just didn't apologize right um really underscored our invisibility that it didn't matter right what we said um so we organized this huge campaign and in which we unleash the native comedians you know on him and supporters and just really built up enough of a viral pressure point that I loved the day I got the call from a reporter at The Huffington Post breaking news that he had been fired and that um he eliminated his name was being taken in vain you
know I think your your question in terms of just kind of the vulnerability or the humor the thing about Native communities and I I like all communities I mean but humor is so important to Who We Are right and because of everything that we've been through I think it's the medicine right of how we constantly confront so many of the challenges the trauma the the all the things right that human humor is just such an important part of who we are it's so natural and um and it's just been an incredibl
e thing to watch increasingly as we've been fighting for more and more representation to you know I think that normally in the United States it always has felt like we've only been given two choices right either you're invisible Vanishing American right or you're going to show up how we are going to Define how you show up whether it's the kind of red-faced you know tier ionized Cody who's ended up being fake Indian um you know or we're going to show up as a mascot or we're going to show up in a
certain way right or we're going to have to be the magical mystical native whatever right um and that is so it's always we've never been able to Define ourselves right and so what's beautiful to see particularly I think within you know for so long but I think within the last you know five or six years is to see the rise of native comedians right and the way that like the now it's like we don't we get to Define ourselves and we're [ __ ] funny right and we don't have to be what everyone else is d
efining us to be and it's been so fascinating I watched this amazing native Comedian Bobby Bobby Wilson get up and do stand up in front of all these Executives at NBC Universal and this was back in 2018. he was hilarious but we're also terrified and the audience it took a minute like oh gosh this native person standing up on the mic is not being tragic or not sitting here making it rain Ing and everyone was a little disappointed right and it took a minute I think even for audiences to be like wo
w but we've found you know that really it's it's been so beautiful to watch native people really that's all we're funny and to watch now the rise of native comedy and who has seen reservation dogs I mean it's you know and to see that that show which is winning Awards it's some Darlings all these things but it's really through the lens of Comedy so I don't know if I'm totally answering your question but it's it's been one that I think the most powerful forces because we've seen dramatic changes i
n the advance of native representation you know in media and entertainment and politics and a variety of different things um and I think as I look at this moment I just see this kind of increased like Embrace and more and more native people saying we're gonna we're gonna be who we are and we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves that's what I love about reservation dogs like when you watch it we're all they're also making fun of ourselves and everybody else and it's a it's a beautiful powerful
thing so yeah that's a incredible way to gain power and claim it uh yes I mean I don't know if you remember this article you were asked to briefly describe your worst gig my comment which fell a little flat when we came out uh about the crowd yeah so can you do you remember a Jewish retirement home no no it was not no okay because that one was pretty bad I can I can read I can read your quote they just fell asleep yeah go ahead not their fault this is what this is what you said about this one yo
u said oh man a gig with a bunch of male Muslim scholars in the first three rows that was the worst they all were simply trying to avoid eye contact yeah that was 45 minutes of bombing um straight bombing I was like I'm contractually obligated to be here oh man but this this is a thing I mean honestly there's a lot of audiences well-meaning who really like to get offended on behalf of others well that yes that would be another one like if I just don't look at her she'll go away or if I don't loo
k at her she's not there um yeah okay that's a negative that's a negative foot just to start on but um yeah I you know the the amazing thing about doing comedy over and over and over again is that you get really good at just doing your job and being a professional at it and just being like you know what if it's a lot of laughter or a zero after let's be committed to the role um yeah that was a that was a that was a particularly demoralizing event in my life now that I think about it I'm so glad
I brought it up um but here's my question for you it was like my parents in the front row you know like will this go away if I just don't look at her yeah but there's a bit of a chicken and egg thing I think with regard to this which I'm curious which is you don't succeed at stand-up comedy without bombing over and over again so it creates resilience yes so I'm like it's sort of like what came first yeah yeah yeah definitely the failure uh okay for sure for sure comes first there and then I thin
k the result so the resilience part of it is being a professional knowing how to do your job in any kind of certain circumstance but I think also like the the practice of bombing as a comedian is how your material is stronger and Tighter so that you don't have you know like the dead air the Dead Space you know you're trying to get every nine seconds you're trying to get a laugh in you know if your writing is tight or not if you have superflu but then sometimes your writing is good and they just
suck they don't want to give you anything and and the thing about like for me I started off really as a comedic Storyteller I I just did like a little talent show at my grad school and then I like won the talent show but I was doing pictures I was like doing like stories about my life but no one thought it was real and they saw the pictures like holy crap that's real I'm like yeah that's my dad and he's slaughtering this animal you know it was like intense you know and they were like you're what
you guys are hippies in Alabama yeah but from the desert yes soon a lot to unpack and then people are like is this real so once I did that I realized oh like maybe I you know maybe I have something here but when you first start off that exchange that energy exchange between you and the audience is very important but the the more you advance in your career in the comedy World it doesn't matter what the audience is doing or not doing you have to go in there and do your job of course there's like
brilliant crowd work which I always would love to do you know and those that's like a fun improvisational part of being um a stand-up it's like kind of where like those two sort of meet but and then I like I really love exploring that but when you're doing a gig like at Second City you've got you know your 12 minutes and you get a you know you gotta deliver and it doesn't matter what the crowd is doing or not so anyways um just to say I would like to just say that my parents are actually support
ive of the comedy thing only because I bought my passion and what I mean by that is I have a real job everybody with a 401k and a health plan right I've got the two kids they're like you want to live your life back orders that's your choice you know what I mean like you have five degrees oh you want to be a clown on stage oh I'm a clown that's fine that's fine it's okay it's okay it's on you I think I mentioned this backstage I think my son quit his corporate job to be an actor full-time and I s
aid to him you know I feel a little bad that your mom and I gave you the illusion you could make a living in this field and he goes don't think I haven't thought about that all right um I want this is for all of you um um when I'm talking about improvisation and the power of improvisation when I do my Keynotes a lot of times I say um this quote and it comes from near IL who's a technologist and um he said if it can't be used for evil it's not a superpower so I want to talk about storytelling and
and my point in like I think storytelling we all think is incredibly powerful to how people learn um but I do get a little frustrated which is like everyone in the world says they're a Storyteller now and he could be working in any position where I mean I'm waiting for like my heart doctor to go you know really I'm a storyteller so so that annoys me um however um is absolutely true in in the sense of this is how people learn and this is how we get people to back us and all that um and so I want
to talk about this notion around Civic power and what it means for civic storytelling and any of you can pick this up and let's sort of play with this concept and you can tell a story if you need to yes um I'm happy to start um but I I wanted to say something that Yasmin said that was so important is the idea of failure and not resting until you get it right until you reach the audience that's actually one of the Hidden pieces when we think about comedy and social change work and public engagem
ent because I think for a very long time and I feel like I can say this because I really have been doing this work of trying to leverage entertainment for social change for 20 years and there's this kind of Mythology that if we just give people all the information surely we will behave differently um sadly I don't know if you noticed that is not how humans operate right so there's a kind of well-meaning arrogance in that idea that will just give people the facts and the information by the way I'
m Pro facts I am profax and pro real information that's not what an alternative facts is what I like I know yes my own facts yes oh your own fact so um but uh but the the idea that you can just sort of like put it out there and then you've done your job it's much much harder to reach people in ways that touch their emotional selves and their heart is much harder to do that so there is also something about a comedian's practice not just what they've just not just what Yasmine has just done for yo
u but everything that it took for her to make all of that work for months and months to figure out how she was going to reach you how she was going to reach different audiences you maybe never reached that one first group but um but think about how hard that was right it wasn't it wasn't like oh here are the jokes and you know you're gonna take it or leave it so I there's something about the creative practice and the artistic practice of really creating comedy that also really belongs in spaces
for um for for entertainment that desires to be you know capturing people um okay Civic power who wants to know what the hell that means some people um great okay a few hands that's perfect um so Civic power is the idea that uh our our democratic system beyond what we think of as you know for for many years there's a lot of scholarship in my field meeting and communication that sort of holds out voting is the one and only way that we show our Civic engagement that's such a disappointing uni-dime
nsional way to think about Civic practice uh the idea of Civic power is the idea that we must believe at some really fundamental level that our Collective mobilized voices are meaningful in creating the culture and the democratic system that we want to believe in that is for public health people also efficacy if we don't genuinely believe that we can do something about our own systems and that if we do it will be meaningful if we don't genuinely believe that we actually don't do anything and so
when entire communities and lived experiences are not seen in cultural landscapes it's very difficult to imagine that one's voice does matter right so Civic power when it comes to Comedy is Civic power is created at least in part in great part if you ask people like Crystal and I who work a lot in culture and narrative created in great part by the narratives that we see in our entertainment system and in our culture that we learn to believe in who is worth paying attention to who are our heroes
who are our villains who is worthy of our respect and our kindness and our empathy all of that is in entertainment culture and comedy gets to play if you ask me the most special role of all and you know why I'm going to be very reductive for one second because often when we don't see entire communities and lived experiences when we do or social problems when we do see them they might be reduced to as Crystal mentioned hero or villain and even the well-meaning hero is itself dehumanizing because
all of us are a mess we are flawed we are trying to survive we are taking care of our kids and our teenagers holy crap so we're all trained to do that so we can see each other and find solidarity and thus caring when we see each other in our shared flawed Humanity that's solidarity that's not empathy I feel bad for you solidarity is holy crap looks like we're similar right so that's where because comedy can cut through those kinds of narratives when it's used in the best possible ways and do tha
t work and going back to the ripple effect of Civic power that is powerful when we see and know one another in that way and I I'm one of the things that Crystal mentioned but she can tell it much better than I can is a really there is a chapter about crystal in my book if you want to know her part of her story it's in my book um you can also ask her but also you could read chapter six uh find the book but you could also ask her um but one of the amazing things that I think brings this to life is
about the show reservation dogs which is about teens living on the res is how many young people living on reservations started to create podcasts and YouTube videos talking about which characters they were like that's such a beautiful byproduct participatory culture and a way of maybe not saying I see and feel that Civic power but a way of saying I feel seen and celebrated and also we're we're able to be funny yeah that's incredible right that's so anyway Civic power Crystal who loves it Crysta
l do you have more to add on to that I'm obsessed with it in terms of talking about where storytelling sort of started with you in terms of understanding how it could be used in this in this way I want it you are so good um yeah I mean for me like I think my great teachers and storytelling were does anybody know the zapatistas are yeah um yeah I worked for the zapatistas not a lot of people know that um but yeah it's oh yeah it's in the book I know all of my staff read it and they're like what t
he hell who's our boss um no but just like I think that was the for me the true initial intersection when you talk about the power of Civic power and storytelling and you know beautiful communicates that would be written by Superman Dante Marcos and like the different zapatista leadership and they were fables and they were stories and they were humor and but they also always dealt with neoliberalism and and you know the inequities and the things that were happening but it really was a different
way and that was the beauty of the movement you know I was a just a 25 year old gal coming on up that I like really began to learn the power of of that story right um in in terms of kind of moving people's hearts and Minds you know and when we think oftentimes like social justice initially when I came up was like hardcore and activism and you kind of just talk at people and you yell and you organize and it's resisting and it's and what I really found through that power of story and that that cha
pter in my life was really about Beauty and joy and creation and humor and how that's just as powerful is that kind of resistance sort of hard language that we we use and to see that through the their storytelling techniques with that inner intersecting with that organizing that Civic power it became a global movement and it was extraordinary to come up in that and I think that was really the foundation if anybody kind of now looks at the work we do at illuminative right because we are so invisi
ble 80 of Americans don't know anything about us and depending on where you live in this country people aren't even sure if we exist that's what our research found that's what we're up against so we got to get damn creative right and and because people just and and people are so ingrained like I was saying earlier that they just want to put us in this pigeonholes either the magical mystical Indian right you know or you're you've got to be [ __ ] you got to be like the over sexualized you know na
tive woman you you know you've got to be these things or you got to be a drunk and just a hot damn mess and like the the stereotypes are so rigid right so we have to get really creative and so I think when I look at not only the work that we do but I look at all the the kind of social justice the organizing working that's happening in Indian Country we are I see it more and more we have really embraced the fact that we are original storytellers that is that is such a part of our tradition doesn'
t matter what tribe you come from and the way that we are more and more using that to connect to people so that they do see us and they're not just they're finally cutting through the the stereotypes right and that when we can you really use whether it's comedy or different storytelling elements right that we work into our campaigns we see more and more that it's calling people in and I think it's so important right now when we think about the importance of Civic power especially with everything
that's going on this country right now um that the power of that storytelling combined is so important now because we're so polarized we're not hearing each other anymore you know so when we can use comedy right to kind of come in and and find a different way to kind of initiate that conversation and then kind of pull somebody in to say take action with us it's a beautiful thing I I don't it's so good yeah man she said all those good words put them together it was amazing um I was just all I wa
s gonna say is just uh I don't I can't relate to The Stereotype thing that you're talking about yeah I just kind of went blank because I kind of start with a blank slate anyways but um I just want to say that existence is resistance yeah just the existence and and and when you're talking about Civic power you're talking about just some knowing that you exist oh now you're now you're now you're talking right now you're talking I because I wear a head scarf because I'm a Muslim one that chooses to
express herself in this way and has the right to and the privilege to be able to express myself in this way because I can walk into a room and it speaks for me without me saying a word there was a really beautiful thing about that and then there's this like holy crap you know I'm in a box now you're talking about the pigeonhole right like she's either not going to speak English correctly or she converted it to Islam that's a lot of people are like so I was talking to a Baptist pastor at like an
Interfaith event he was like when did you convert to this are you trying to piss off your pair is this a phase and I was like sir this is uh it's rude uh that's rude [Music] um but but I was just gonna say that uh I did like a narrative workshop with Marshall Gantz and he talks a lot about using the power of narrative and story to Advanced Civic power he talks about the story of you the story of us and then the ask and that's kind of like the Paradigm in which you do a lot of activist storytell
ing he also worked with the zapatistas and has a long um you know history with that anyways but I was going to say with comedy it's got to be funny so I am telling the story of me and then I'm telling the story of us because the more specific I get about my story I'm gonna hit you the more specific I get about what's going on in my life suddenly we're gonna relate whether you like it or not because you're going to see yourself in me and the hope is that I also see myself in you and that we can h
ave an actual dialogue which we're gonna do today we're going to have some questions from the audience the best part um but I I know for me personally I started comedy because of trump because he just he's adorable and has done so much good oh I was worried you're gonna be critical yeah yeah just make so plush and orange but like a little orange oh you know I I was I just did I did a little interview before and he he went on interested Cooper Anderson compressed like what do you think about Musl
ims and he goes Islam hates us that's what I think like what are you talking about how can America that's not even 300 years old an infant a a toddler not even like trying to walk has something to say about a civilization that's over 1400 years old like what are you even talking about like like the like the the the the the lack of historicity in that comment you know I just made that [ __ ] up but you know what I'm saying I did if he's gonna make [ __ ] up I'll make [ __ ] up your mouth turning
backs I was like oh no I gotta go exist somewhere on some stage I gotta go exist because that's my form of resistance and uh I can storytell I could do that uh without the pictures maybe it'll work and it did and one literally one open mic to now that's that's you know I haven't I didn't go and sign up for you know people are like hey is this like is that story real I'm like yeah they're like come here just do it again do it again in front of a whole other group of people so it's very very power
ful because now my existence is is is shocking and expanding and relating and confusing and conversating and that's great that's the turn that we want we want that churn to think about what is possible what is possible for a Muslim woman that looks like me and what's so cool is now I I just I was in New York I was performing in New York I was working in New Jersey last weekend and this young woman comes out to me her name is Sarah and she was she started as a personal assistant at Saturday Night
Live and she's like hey I saw you at something in 2019 before the pandemic hit I just want you to know I I want to do comedy I was like hell yeah boo it was amazing to see and then it was like yeah we should be existing in those spaces now she's gonna Eclipse me and I'm so excited to see it yeah I I really am I am I want the front row seats for Sarah's you know comedy because that yeah baby because that I mean that's what we're doing I mean that's why I'm doing it I'm doing it to create Civic p
ower and the way you do it is inspiring those that look like you and expanding the people that don't yeah that's great you know I've done a I did a panel at the Chicago International Film Festival where we talked about why comedy and uh mental illness which is similar in terms of of what we're talking about in the sense that I think people because comedy in and of itself is normally incongruent that is part of what makes it funny something's incongruent um it's hard for people to you know latch
on to like oh can you really make fun of this and we all hate that question that comes which is what can you not make fun of so please don't ask it um but I but I think that um uh in in understanding that um I mean as F Scott Fitzgerald said the key to intelligence is holding two opposite ideas in your head at the same time right so I'm curious for you has there ever been a moment with each of you where you have had that doubt of like oh does it does this belong here or did you like for me at Se
cond City it was just the realization working here on staff back in the 80s and early 90s night after night and seeing the audiences get it or not get it or get it or not get it and realizing as I think we talked about you talked about before this idea of practice you know that oh no no it's a practice you have to do it like this and and the realization also that you know there's no joy without suffering I mean that it's just a fact of everything so so the fact is like why of course why not acco
mmodate because otherwise aren't we just gonna cry the whole time I don't know what do you think there's no Shadow Without light yeah right and there's no light without shadow I know someone's smarter than me put those good words together [Music] yes the professor at Cambridge University his name is TJ winter we know him as Abdel hakimura a Muslim American sorry British scholar I had a little slit I wish we could claim him as an American but he's too smart he's from the UK um yeah I think that t
he the layeredness as well is what you're talking about right like that layered experience and going through it over and over and over again I think there's something that is birth that's like beautiful out of that not only does your comedy get better but I think you also like you said it's like learning how to relate to your audience in different ways and also some people like oh mama stick to my guns and do this thing the way that I want to do it until you're comfortable with it I'm gonna make
you I'm going to continue to make you uncomfortable I think about George Carlin can't imagine George Carlin going up there and being everyone being like wow George that was amazing I can imagine people like trying to boycott him getting angry not wanting to invite him and he's like a Legend um I don't know what your question was but I wanted to share that [Applause] you covered it it's the the shadows in the light right I said something smart I think that someone else smarter said I was gonna s
ay something else I was gonna say something else about that yeah [Music] you're okay so I will just say that we're talking about building like community community of of of people who are self-doubters you know like I think comedians have were fragile and you talk about mental health a little bit but like a lot of us like you said like do you have doubt that was your question like do you sometimes have doubt yeah we are like wildly insecure we're like please do you like it keep laughing do you li
ke it now how about I do it this way will you laugh more will you love me it's like it's all it's like a this is a dance that we're doing and it's because we are often very insecure there's lots of doubt I just wanted to have an honest moment here just as a Muslim woman who is practicing who has two young boys that I'm trying to raise in this world it is very hard for me sometimes to be in spaces where there is alcohol and drugs being consumed and I am like the odd person out right like a lot of
times those are coping mechanisms in self-medication for people's like very serious issues that they have so I sometimes doubt whether I'm supposed to be kind of in these some of the environments and I always think like I'm very careful about cussing on stage although not today but um like if this was on YouTube I would be careful because I don't want my kids to be like you just said [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] you know I like no you can't say that don't say that word um and so there's just something
there's something I'm negotiating at all times and you know you might you might call it you know shame or guilt or regret you might call it all those things but I think I I struggle personally with that because there's lots of environments that people are going to write me off as I walk in right like I'm saying like you're sending messages when you walk in and there are comedians they're like like I'll get like wholesale written off and it was amazing to me that comedians of color and and female
comedians were just naturally more open to me being a part of the conversation and like and other comedians just would write me off and I have found I'm gonna be honest I'm gonna be real right now the Muslim male comedians don't like me I have no Muslim male comedian friends except for you yes you know I love you you have one he's like he's a he's a baby you know because he's just coming up he's like a mentee right but there is one I got one he's a gen Zer so of course he's normal you know Jen'
s ears I swear you guys are amazing so open-minded on everything you know they're yeah they're just like it's a spectrum baby all of it it's just you know and we got all these [ __ ] Hang-Ups you know and so the the I will just say the established muslimale comedians have opened absolutely zero doors for me none in fact they try to avoid me at all costs because Here Comes Islam judging their expression right and their involvement in environments of self-coping and medication and you know moving
forward they have doors open to them that I never will and but my hope is that Sarah will have a door open yeah as you know we'll have a a door open this young man will have a door open you know and I don't know if you get any love from them or not they don't give me any love bro but there is not one comedian that reaches out to me that I'm like screw you not one and one of them she's like this YouTuber her name is tazzy Faye now she's making a film and I had I had talked to her about stand up l
ike four years ago and she's like I want to cast you in this film and I'm like bet so I'm just saying you never know like not being an [ __ ] what will what that will do but there's lots of there's a lot of self-doubt is what I want to say I think it's part and parcel of this process and um I don't know it's therapy I guess it's just therapy man there's a line when people have asked me about working here for this long working with all the talent and I often say that no one got into comedy becaus
e they're well adjusted yeah which I think is generally true but here's the other realization being a 56 year old man because I don't know that any human being is well adjusted but I've ever met my life I mean you know as you said we're all hot messes and we're all dealing with with this stuff um and I'm and I'm curious Crystal you've I know Katie's heard this term and I'm assuming you have to the punching up punching down term uh some some so in in comedy circles or the people talk about you kn
ow then that you should never be punching down you shall also always be punching up that if you have a certain kind of status or power to make fun of people who are lower in status or lower in power is a Bad Thing generally I I actually think that that is that is true I'm just curious in in your travels if that's ever I mean because I'm sorry hearing from you that yeah some people are fine punching down even in your own Community have you come across that I mean I think you know definitely I lov
e it I mean it is definitely punching up and I think the majority of our comedians do but I think sometimes the things that we're confronted with are just so [ __ ] egregious yeah right and and but you also look at relational relationality and power and it's not like native peoples are like up lording over a lot of people right I mean everything is punching up um but I do think uh yeah I think there's times where they just they go for it right with some of the things that we've we've really had
to do um and I think to come back to I was just really interested to come back to kind of your initial question right is there anything that's sort of off limits right yeah you know and I think initially and I really credit my dear friend Miss Katie um for you know I I think I always understood was like yeah this makes sense comedy because this is so a part of who we are as native people but being so cautious right um initially about it and just I think being an activist who takes herself far to
o seriously um most of the time and um but I think like what I saw and I just checked them out Google the 1491s but it's it's the first like really big Native American Comedy Group right and all of them now are the ones behind reservation dogs right um and all these other amazing shows and things that are going to start coming out soon um if we ever get past all these strikes and all kinds of other things um but you know I think that they they did this brilliant play um that um uh gosh what is t
he famous theater up in Washington state or Oregon God I'll come uh not Arena Theater anyways but they did a play called between two knees and it was like literally the history of like native people in like a play like genocide boarding schools you know priests and nuns assaulting kids I mean it just was like it was like a whole story but it was comedy right and I just remember this moment of watching this skit and it was about if any of you I hope please also Google about Native American boardi
ng schools that's there's actually an active investigation being led by the Biden Administration into the United States culpability and religious institutions in taking hundreds of thousands of native children putting them into these horrifying institutions and beating their the nativeness out of them right and I would never forget watching the play where they did this whole it was like a musical and it was like really depicting the salt that the the priests and nuns would do the kids and includ
ing sexual assault physical assault but they turned it into this kind of musical comedy skit in this moment and it was really intense and I think that was the moment of like has this gone too far and it was an audience of like 90 white people and then I think we were like the little native section that got to watch it um and what I appreciated about the element of comedy and music and it was so absurd in some ways that it actually won was an entry point to that largely native or non-native audie
nce right that was kind of conservative to actually allow them to kind of come in and learn a part of American History most people don't know right and for us native sitting the audience it really actually opened the door for us to talk about what has been largely a taboo subject in so many of our families because of the abuse and the multi-generational trauma and I really think that being on this journey from Katie to watching what the 1491s have been able to do and like if you watch reservatio
n dogs it's that also that layered approach to story and comedy as well that one minute they're doing something so absurd the next minute they're talking about suicide but not in a way that feels preachy or like we're kind of pitching holding you know because we're very clear that everybody thinks we're a hot mess right we're just pitiful and pathetic and it's like that multi-layered approach of using comedy and all those things that I just suddenly all the subjects I thought that we could never
really talk about comedy is actually not only open the door to invite non-natives in to learn a little bit more about us and because they what we learned from our research is that when you start talking to Americans about the Native American Experience in this country and all the things that has happened to us people glaze they just shut down and I know that this is we don't have Monopoly as native people any people you know communities of color know right the minute you start getting into thin
gs people like oh that's too much I don't want to go there I don't want to feel guilty and I think that we've learned through our work that comedy just allows people to start it's like just spoon feeding them in pulling them in a little bit more but the power that it's brought our own people to really actually start to have conversations about mental health we did a cool you know collaboration one of the things that we did with you know your welcome America which was a comedy collaboration we di
d with with Bethany Hall and Miss Katie and some amazing comedians um but I just there's a real power to that that now I think there's nothing that we can't touch right and I have seen how effective our comedians have been in just one of the most effective things in shutting Mr Rick Santorum down and the [ __ ] over there that at CNN sorry was just Clowning the hell out of them and watching that and watching that and watching that and how effective that was into actually mobilizing people to whe
re there was finally good action can I just add something really quick so I'm thinking of so many stories just to add on to that but um the tail end of what Crystal was saying so there's you know for those of you who follow authoritarian regimes um for those who are interested in that um you know my eye contact with me I did not that's messed up I saw you do that like waiting here you are distracting me oh is uh you know if you look at a pattern when a country either starts to lose its freedom o
f expression and it's freedom of speech there's a really acute pattern and I'm a little frustrated that we actually don't write about this in a way that's more than just anecdotal but when you look at a country that is in trouble in terms of you know dictators or want to be dictators or close to um there's a pattern in which journalists are threatened of course and this is something that we really know intuitively and we know we know this right but the next people are comedians they're always th
e next people and so just to go to what crystal is saying about Rick Santorum part of what is so valuable about what comedians do as social critique in the face of the most dramatic circumstances you know ending your freedoms is um they show through satire and through comedy the worst thing that can happen to a strong man or a wannabe strong man is that you show that you're not scared and comedy shows that you're not scared it's deeply deeply threatening and so one of the things that I am fond o
f saying to um maybe a sort of Civil Society writ large whenever I encounter people who are still a little skeptical about comedy I say well I mean you need to look no further than the fact that they're exiled immediately right people who want you to be afraid understand that comedians are powerful and one thing that I'll just add to your dark and light question is um oh and I'll add one other thing to Crystal's thing so uh one of the comedians that I work with actually yes me and I just worked
with him was it last week or two weeks ago we just worked on a little thing together yeah um there's a comedian named Corey Ryan Forrester he's based in Northern Georgia uh in a part of the country that's known for Marjorie Taylor green and the Dukes of Hazzard and uh and so he lives there and um he's a he's a progressive comedian he he wrote a book called the liberal redneck Manifesto and uh and you should look him up he's very funny he has this Alter Ego called the buttercream dream uh Leslie
Jones who is my favorite comedian called other than Yasmine yes um called him her favorite committee anyway so um Corey is you know is in LA and New York a lot because of their Show Business towns and he's really you know doing real comedy work but he lives in the Deep South and he says you know when I go into the Deep South I go into Alabama and Louisiana and Georgia and Mississippi he says I know exactly what I'm doing I know how my accent sounds I know what I look like I know that we're alrea
dy kind of in community with one another and I know many of them do not think the way that I do so he says I've learned enough to understand how to do you know if I'm doing an hour set he'll do about 40 minutes of like I'm going to talk about my memo I'm from the south too so I can say that and not make it totally awkward uh but uh or he's like oh I dealt jokes about how I'm lactose intolerant you know whatever like he's a fart joke but then three quarters of the way in he'll hit a anti-racist j
oke or anti-homophobia joke and he says by then I have them and it's not that I think everybody walks out of the room and has a completely changed mind but he says without fail people will come up to me afterwards and say you know I just didn't think of it like that right and he said and I quoted him saying this in my book because I thought it was a memorable way of saying it Cory Ryan Forrester said I cannot get you to come to my critical race Theory talk in the Deep South but I really can get
you to come to my hour-long comedy show and I'm going to slip in the same idea so that's very powerful thank you for clapping for that that felt good I too am insecure you ask me no you're so secure you're so I don't know about that I don't know about that later you can give me a company I love you Professor um but that but just to give people sort of you know I'm always fond of giving people like language or framework to hang on if you want to um sort of put these ideas into buckets and if that
's helpful for your brain comedy has always been used for social critique the original definition of Comedy that we know of from Aristotle has to do with the things in our culture that are so grotesque and unjust that they deserve to be lampooned and therefore correct as sort of the original definition but comedy is also this idea of play and this idea of Civic imagination the idea that we can't entirely build the world that we want to live in if we can't see and feel what it looks like when it
better and when it's different and sometimes comedy can provide us with that kind of play and hope and optimism and sort of activate the best of us in that way so you know social critique and Civic imagination you're welcome so this is perfect in terms of I do have a kind of a last question so for folks who are going to help us with the Q a want to grab the Mike's backstage this will be a perfect time um did you see in the news last week about what happened in China so a joke by a Chinese stand-
up comedian that Loosely referenced a slogan used to describe the country's military has caused an entertainment for more than two million dollars after a slapped with enormous fines by authorities and this guy's been blackballed so I knew about the story and I I posted it like scary uh and my friends got Simon at NPR actually is going to talk about it this weekend and sort of said give me your thoughts which I have here but I'm sort of curious well do you want to hear me what I what I wrote yea
h yeah but can I add really quickly for those who don't I have also been getting a lot of reporter calls about this so I've been following it what's interesting about this story is um two years ago in 2021 there was an explicit Crackdown on culture um the the folks in charge there basically said we're going to crack down even more on Creative culture so this was like a slippery slope and so it's always interesting for those of us again back to if you're watching governance issues um it's usually
not immediate right there's usually a little so this is why it was so dangerous that Donald Trump um you're adorable would you call him an adorable plush and he's a pleasure orange plush yeah uh when he in 2017 kept talking about shutting down Saturday Night Live the same thing y'all it's a slow slippery slope and if you look at countries that have lost this kind of cultural expression there are some countries that have taken comedy out completely it lives underground by the way someday I'll wr
ite about that but um but taking out comedy completely it's not it's not an accident so this to me was not entirely accidental although horrifying to to read it's sort of manifest manifestation but yes what did you say about it all right I don't know if he's going to use any of this and it's not too long but this is what I said to him I said comedy has always been a powerful tool for speaking truth to power whether it's a court jester or the satire of Jonathan Swift comedians have often provided
an effective way to acknowledge the elephant in the room the problem is when the elephant doesn't want to be acknowledged there's a reason to totalitarian of fascist regimes attempt Asylum silence comedians because they know how powerful their message can be if you can silence the comedians you can silence anyone when I first read about the spine I was shocked but after the shock came an uneasy reflection while I've never felt the sting of censorship in my lifetime it wasn't that long ago that
Lenny Bruce spent time in jail in this very country because of the kind of Comedy he was performing in a nightclub in San Francisco that was 1961. I will also tell you that the most translated editions of my book yes and lessons from the Second City are from Asian countries including a translation in Chinese I literally approved the artwork last month the original title of our book was the revolution will be improvised maybe we were on to something before we changed the title that's good we'll s
ee what he uses so this is scary it's happening somewhere else but it's happened here and happens here um to not so dwell in the darkness because you had a real positive spin on that imagination Kelly well let's talk about that for YouTube like what what you know what do you take what's the positive thing you take out of that what's the how do we keep going well okay so here's a couple things you know I'm I'm Egyptian and Libyan and I don't know if you know we got CeCe in there in Egypt right no
w and Libya has two warring governments it's not a good spot that we're in um but I was thinking about best Sam Youssef and how he was also targeted because really he's following the expression of Jon Stewart kind of trying to do the same thing in Egypt and the Egyptian government was like oh hell no we're gonna kill you you know so you know he lives in New York and and he he is able to kind of um find Freedom here in a country that like you said kind of wrestled with this I think we're seeing i
t a different way now with the book bands in these state by state book bands like like poetry books of poet like what's wrong with The Bluest Eye the blue is I by Toni Morrison was the single most influential book of my life by far I remember reading it in seventh grade and being like it's all a lie I mean it was just it was so important it was so important for me to read that book and to realize um that I wasn't alone and so I think we're just we're it's like it's like taking companions from pe
ople because that's what comedy is comedy's companionship it's like I'm saying like I'm talking about my life but you're seeing yourself in me and so now we're now we're buddies right and that's why people feel like they could talk to me and be like oh my God I love that bit oh I did the same thing with my wife you know like they can they you know they they have a camaraderie and so when we take that companionship away I think we take like real forms of role modeling and real forms of inspiratio
n from the whole future generation and something that we have to watch out for and it's about having a Civic imagination that's got a sense of humor and is not afraid it's not so afraid of new ideas or ideas that somehow in your mind run contrary to what you know it's like when you when you censor things you make them sexier that's what I think but Sam Youssef would not have been a popular as popular I don't think until he got exiled from freaking Egypt and now it's like yeah I want to meet him
you know I like I want to meet that guy so anyways um I was just gonna say um one point about uh like my comedy like what what I tried to do on stage so for example that white privilege joke that I just did okay for you guys where I was talking about um this crazy woman it's a really happened at a Marshals and that joke is is meant to disarm so I'm talking about something else right you have no idea where I'm going with that joke so I'd have to gain your trust to get you to that last point right
that last joke but also my hope is that there are people in the audience that think I don't have white privilege that's freaking crazy but if they but if they see me right if they see me in their mind that just like things don't compute and I'm like no no bro like I got white privilege then the hope is that that reflects like oh I never thought of it that way right I never I never thought of it that way and it's that opening that those openings and I think in a subversive but playful way and be
ing a little naughty and making you think in a different way I think that's the expansive piece and that's like companionship so I really hope that we don't lose that and you know the more bands I don't know the more sex I don't know you know I don't know ban it all you want you can only want to make them more popular we could only hope yeah Crystal any thoughts yeah I mean I've been I had knee surgery a couple weeks ago so I have been like not watching the news and just you know being on some g
ood drugs no I'm just kidding um and you're not kidding laying in bed watching Netflix so I did not see the news but I think what's interesting about it is it it's horrifying right it's all the things but I think we constantly externalize that that's happening over in that con that country and that authoritarian regime and all of these places where these horrifying it's happening here and it just has felt like increasingly since 2016 since the plushy orange plushie person came came into our oran
ge plushie sounds better um that it's been like we're like that frog in the pot of water and it's just slowly that that heat keeps turning up that we just become increasingly more tolerant of the fact that all of these things are getting taken away yes and that headline that you just read is gonna in a couple years or less be something that's happening here and I think that's the thing that we really have to understand is it is insane and I'm just kind of watching more and more has people I thin
k I think everybody's exhausted I don't know what it is that we just seem to have a very high tolerance for our rights to freedom of speech to express ourselves in all kinds of ways just are going outside the door and like increasingly people are like okay but man I can check out Tick Tock and you know other things and I I you know I even think like when you saw that Montana's starting to ban Tick Tock I was like and it's so funny because they didn't even use this covert spine that China is tryi
ng to get us argument no this is really a reaction on the right because if you remember it was the tick tockers that organized that shut down Trump's big rally in Tulsa Oklahoma where I live they organized and got all the tickets that's how it all started they organized on Tick Tock to get all the K-pop stands or whatever to go buy up all the tickets and then when he showed up nope they were empty seats right I honestly think that this is like the rides like we're going for tick tock no particip
ate we want to hear you boom keep talking yeah but I mean I think all of that's to say is that it's happening here right and and it's happening all around us right now and I do think to kind of come back to the whole reason why we're here about the power of Comedy right is increasingly what I I see in the work that we do is that people are getting their news from our comedians people are not going and reading the New York Times and the da da da and certainly you know younger people right differe
nt ways that people are getting their news they're getting turned on and so much of it is comedy and people are hungry for it and I love that you know the idea of this like Trojan Horse right of like three quarters of that set is just like I'm relating to you and we're following together and then I'm gonna start hitting you with some stuff and I think that that's the thing that as you know because I'm looking ahead at the next 10 years we're doing all the analysis about what's coming and I'm not
gonna make you know like get all depressed and be like but there's a lot of threats coming particularly at our community is that with others but I'm focused on that and I think when I think about the Investments and where we're going to double down in some of those organizing strategies it's going to be in comedy and thinking about really different ways because increasingly we're turning off our ears and our eyes to what is happening around us but it seems like comedy has a way to keep kind of
jarring that door open and the minute we get up on our soap boxes and start talking about things everyone's like whatever um so I think that's that's really the important thing and we can't we can't take it for granted and this is the moment more than ever that we need to be investing and supporting in the comedians from diverse communities in all kinds of places because otherwise I think you know and obviously coupled with organizing and as we think about you know Civic power and Civic imaginat
ion about the world we want to be I think this is going to be such an important strategy within all of the work that we do if this country is going to make it you know and we have to kind of keep finding the jarring ways and I think that's why we also have to really support comedians like going there and being edgy and and you know um and and really pushing the boundaries when it does make us uncomfortable because I think we're a little too comfortable in this country right now because we're lit
erally watching our bodies our rights everything go away I mean oddly enough I think you can kind of Bank on the comedians I think there's you know if I'm going to trust the population the young Comedians and I know we have some teachers out there too all right Izzy can we raise the um the lights a bit so we can uh get some questions from the audience and then see your beautiful faces yeah do we have the folks out there with the microphones [Music] hi oh God okay I'm nervous um hi this is actual
ly a question for you mean um hi um so I loved how you talked about your non-traditional Pathway to Comedy and Performing yeah and about how the pressures of like our community as Muslims like kind of contributed to that and also the misogyny um of the gatekeeping um my question is the flip side of that is that they're predominantly white institutions that are very gatekeepy um in terms of how many Muslims are allowed to access them yes so while you're on stage at one of such institutions what a
dvice would you give to predominantly white institutions like the second City who have not had a historically good relationship with people of color and marginalized communities and like very little Muslim representation what advice could you give The Gatekeepers so that that um like one only one of us is that that does not have to continue to persist yeah okay go for it she's hitting below the belt but I kind of like it it's a little violent but but beautiful good you know I you know first of a
ll I want to say thank you for being here thank you for supporting Second City even when you don't feel that you're always seen here okay so thank you [Music] a part of that is that two-way exchange right so we have to be open-minded they have to be open-minded I think we have to have more you know more programming and I think you just saying that is sending a message right like there has to be more of us it's not just one of us we're these like Dynamic people and we have different expressions a
nd everyone should be welcome um and I think that the the the more of us the more of us there are the open mics talking to other friends writing our Pilots getting out and and shooting it ourselves that's you know we always have to build it and I think that um you know I'm here to encourage you I'm here to like support you but I don't think they're going to get that message until you keep signing up right you have to keep showing up which is really hard when the door is closed but that's what ma
rginalized communities have done they kept showing up it's that persistence that persistence that is your resistance because you are existing and you're saying I'm not going anywhere all of you yeah thank you thank you for that next well my question is going to seem very frivolous in comparison but um Crystal you mentioned Reservoir Dogs and uh uh sorry what did I say Reservoir whatever totally different genre and Katie you mentioned uh that Leslie Jones is your favorite I was curious if each of
you what is the comedic content that you're consuming right now that is bringing you the most Joy [Music] I have um so my I have teenagers it's going great um who has teenagers so his teenagers and was like oh my God yeah it happens suddenly anyway um but they're very they have really really I really like their comedy taste and so comedy is one of the things that we do together we share Clips with each other a lot and like we connect and um I really I mean I like lots of com big fan of um reser
vation dogs for sure uh I've I've been enjoying through my kids eyes as okay I know you're going to judge what kind of parent I am but anybody who thinks that they can control what their teenagers are watching I'm there's no way um so they I really like big mouth uh do you all know this uh it's a big mouth is such a great show um you know I can't remember which no oh my God is this gonna out me as the worst parent ever are you all horrified anyway it's very funny do you know this show Big Mouth
yeah big Matt anyway it's very edgy it's very edgy but but part of what it talks about is like girls I know girls in reproductive health issue and it's really really funny and it means a lot to teenagers um I also still um I like some of the bits that South Park has been doing uh lately about some public affairs issues I feel like they usually kind of nail it um uh let me see if there's one other those are I don't know that's probably what I you know I have to watch a lot of Comedy for like the
yes and laughter lab and other things so I'm really enjoying watching comedy that uh comedians are creating from scratch that you haven't necessarily seen in the marketplace yet so I actually just got back from a um we hold this thing that's oh yes I mean now we call it y'all camp Oh I like it uh where we bring these like home amazing comedy fellas together to um real like create community and work on their stuff uh and uh I just got back from a weekend of watching the most incredible comedy tha
t hasn't been made yet about issues that range from racial Justice to trans visibility um you know climate Justice um I'm trailing off here now I'm so nervous that I said big mouth and you all are going to be no no it was me I I I'm a hater I'm a hater it was me it was my face they were laughing at my face it was you I hate big mouth no way I hate that cruel guy I don't like that guy oh my God it sucks sorry I don't like it I don't like him I saw him live he just sucks I'm so sorry I've been sor
ry I just don't like it I don't like the writing I think it's I like women okay so I was just gonna say I really I I like Roy Woods Jr everything that Roy Woods says everything that Roy Woods JR says brings me joy it brings me so much joy um I love Leslie Jones I could just watch her forever just cussing at her TV um I could just do I could watch that all the time uh zainab Johnson is just one of my absolute favorites she's just a killer um everything she talks about everything she talks about i
s funny um and I like Andy Tillman I've been watching a lot of this Appalachian woman named Andy Tillman she is flipping hilarious she's just like hey guys hey and she's always like that church lady did she watches the Baptist lady the Baptist lady's so good and the aunt that's always late to church that's good it's all good what anything that's bringing you Joy Crystal you seem like a joyful soul you've been doing a lot of drugs so you're enjoying I have a drink I'm like you enjoy you're the la
st three weeks because you partake um no I think adding on to every like one of the somebody that brings me a ton of joy and his entire like just everything he's created is taika white TT and a lot of people do not know that he's Maori he's amazing he's Maori and Jewish and I mean taika ytt uh and so he um oh my God I'm like by the way I took a red eye last night and didn't sleep so I'm like really trying to start I was struggling to find my words right now um but what is the film uh JoJo rabbit
one of my all-time like heartbreaking and also funny and amazing we are in the shadows right taik is an executive producer and kind of guest stars every once in a while on it um and then there's another great show that he and his Compadres without New Zealand's like paranoil Paranormal 9-1-1 show it's just it's so silly and ridiculous and just everything he does is so absurd and so I was just saying he's getting ready to come out with a new project and he's also the co-executive producer of res
ervation dogs and so when you really look at him and Sterling harjo they're just they're Geniuses honestly and it's just such a beautiful comedic you know creative partnership between the two of them um and I think it's just such a big Testament to why that that show is so good and then other than that there's just not enough native content like I love native Comedians and so I spent a lot of time trolling Instagram um just a star to watch really is Janice meeting from Rutherford Falls and she p
lays amazing characters on on reservation dogs like the rugged auntie and you know the the the crabby you know receptionists at the medical center you know and all the other things um she's one of my favorites along with Bobby Wilson too so you but right now there's hopefully you know we're gonna start seeing more of them soon so amazing great other questions yeah I got the Mikey okay so thank thank you all for this so far I'll just the discussion today on the power of Comedy has focused on one
form of Comedy which is stand-up comedy like with the brilliant Yasmin everyone give it up for Yasmine yeah [Applause] that's my cousin and thank you [Music] but we've also talked about comedy in other context right so like Crystal you just mentioned JoJo rabbit we could talk about something as touchy as uh what's happened what happened in Germany but approach it through something funny right and then Katie you also talked about how it can be woven into so many different forms so for um I'm goin
g to pose this first to Yasmine and then author Katie of course you know we'll welcome Crystal if you'd like to join in which is how would you choose if you're a producer if you're making creative content how would you say okay this would work well with stand-up comedy versus weaving it into something let's say like academic discourse or uh like a cross-cultural storytelling how do you know what works better with pure stand-up comedy versus comedy Plus first of all I like that you're taking note
s you got your laptop out you got your hat you're just a professor and I like it um he needs an internship hook it up Katie he's a family member um he's not he's from South Asia I'm from Africa guys we're a different continent anyways um so first of all thank you for the brilliant question um so you're asking about the medium right like how do you actually choose the medium you want to you might be like I'm gonna be like totally honest with you really really good work is work that you know okay
so when they say like write what you know do what you know perform what you know if you suck at stand up that is not the right medium right like that's not what you know that's not a natural thing for you so it might be that you speak to other producers who produce similar kinds of content especially if you're doing something outside of your Lane right it's always good to create a community of comedians or community of people who are creatives and I love like writing collectives for that right i
f you can join a writer's room if you can join an accountability group to help with the writing those are all like great ideas like you can bounce out bounce people you know bounce it off of other people who've done things before you and that's what the y'all uh Community is about that's what the yes and laughter lab is about so you should apply but anyways what I was going to say is that um that's that's my answer to you I would not I would not do an improv group yeah even though I'd be I'd lov
e to do I need to learn it you know um that's probably not going to be the right medium for me but stand up is going to be natural or storytelling is going to be natural I I think about that a lot when I'm thinking about I want to write a TV pilot and so I'm already in talks with another creative partner who's like who writes in that world you know so I'm not going to go out and try to like go in the kitchen and be like I'm gonna throw everything in this spot you know I gotta go and talk to like
the chef like how does that how does you make this work so I I would just say like lean on your Partnerships you don't have to do it alone and in fact you're going to make it better I think um when you when you look to your creative Partners I'm actually going to pipe in and just because we we do produce right whether it's social justice campaigns we're producing you know things for you know YouTube or now we're getting into TV and film the thing that I've learned the most is to trust the creat
ive and just to get out of it instead of saying this should be because I'm not a comedian I'm not funny I don't know I don't know half the things you're asking me here I'm like oh my god well that's on me where's my glossary over here I'm just kidding um but I've actually just learned as we get into reducing and we you know oftentimes it's like wait there's a problem there's a problem that we want to address there's something that we want to call attention to and what I've learned successfully a
nd part of this has been through the partnership with Katie right because she had she was the one that dragged me into a room of comedy writers and said show them the research and then they're going to kick you out of the room for like four days and then you're gonna see what they create and I think that's when I really learned trust them right and I think through that process whether it's you know comedians collaborating or it's one or whatever they just instinctually know because it goes to yo
ur point about what are they good at or whatever and I just think you just have to really trust them in the process yeah the only thing I will add is um it really is true that some comedy people are very good at one genre and not another it's really true I'm thinking of one and I Kelly Leonard is the real expert on this so I kind of want you to also answer it but there's a somebody I was thinking of immediately as you were asking that question I'm going to leave this anonymous um a really brilli
ant character comedian and I watched this person do stand up not funny at all but a hilarious uh front-facing comedy um character person and it's really interesting how that doesn't necessarily translate I mean so that's just one answer to your question and I feel like you know I feel like part of why you might be asking this maybe you are a comedian but um this is why that process of trying and trying really matters because if you're killing it with your characters and not stand up you might kn
ow that maybe that's not your thing but it also has to do with what kind of writer you are right I mean this is where I really do actually want Kelly to weigh in too if you're a writer who can imagine seasons and seasons of characters and arcs and stories like Sterling harjo you're probably writing an episodic television project but if you're someone who gets up and uh is you know it's just different ways of knowing that but I think one of the things that Kelly Leonard says I guess I'll quote yo
u right in front of you is that not practicing comedy without a license I really love that idea it's the idea that we're all you know we're all a little bit funny or we have like a funny a person in our family I like to say I'm a not a professional funny person but I'm a funny professional I'm a very funny professor um but uh but the idea that just because we're funny doesn't mean I can't go right a television comedy pilot I can write a book but I can't write a TV pilot because I'm not a comedy
writer so it's the importance of practicing practicing practicing honing the craft taking it really seriously no comedian gets good at the writing or the Performing without doing it a ton right yeah do you have anything to add Kelly the only thing I'll add is um so my wife runs the first ever ba in comedy writing and performance from Columbia College so every parent's nightmare um and she just sent in her second book to Northwestern University press and it's called funnier and the reason it's ca
lled funnier is because at the open houses the parents will come up and say hey are you gonna make my daughter or son funny she goes I can't make them funny I can make them funnier [Music] taking the thing that they have finding out how to do that the best way possible and that might be stand up and it might be writing and it might be something else but like you discover the medium that works for you or and I think this is the thing that she certainly teaches what she calls comedy cross-training
because you don't know where you're going to end up at this point right you might end up in a writer's room someone might just want your voice and then you're gonna have to figure that [ __ ] out no pressure that's it let's do one more question okay right here I've got the mic so make it a good one this is the last one oh such pressure well I want to First say thank you to all of you for sharing who you are and your vulnerability and your courage and making us laugh because laughing does matter
and it's so important what you do for those of us who are part of bipoc or the Lesser included folks you speak to us very well the question I have in this world that we're in now with the divisiveness that you've talked about and you've spoke some of this um you guys mean with expanding your your comedy how do you work towards being more inclusive of the plush world of the Maga world of the people that don't think like we do and also of acknowledging that In This Very Room not everybody would l
abel themselves a left-wing liberal right even though they may all care about human rights and so how do we work towards being truly inclusive melting The Divide I'm wondering if in the what is the name of the Kamal y'all or y'all group yes and laughter lab y'all the y'all yes and laughter lab oh this is wonderful gender inclusive and friendly if we get some of the folks because in rooms across the country people are laughing but they're laughing at different things so do we have a way of bringi
ng the comics together the comedians together to talk about these heart issues do we get some of the folks on the other side from plush world and I like plush it sounds like juice world like I want that to be a rapper I want to be a rapper named plush world but no but push world I love that yes what do we do to make sure that we're being truly inclusive and making laughter that we can all laugh at because we need the comic relief in the world we're living in yeah it is a fantastic question that
people like Katie that that is like she is investigating that question just so you know and we're on we work on projects together just about what you just said how in the world do you cross lines with people you probably I probably should stop saying white people that would be better for me and you know it's just hard because they're there and um you know I mean they're everywhere they're ever they're right there look at that just he's literally staring at me and I got one I got one at home that
just like right there so anyways but um I was just gonna say that um in general in general I think there are certain themes that appeal to people right so for example and this is hard because we're trying to walk the line we're not trying to water it down then it's boring you said it beautifully Everyone likes hot tea some people like cold tea everyone hates warm tea right like he said I happen to like warm tea I would just like to say but but um how how do you straddle this line how do you bal
ance what you say to not alienate people but to reach them and the only way that I would answer that question is kind of like what I was saying before like the more specific you get to your life the more specific you really get into like what has an emotional response for me the more likely you will hit it with like an arrow into someone else's life without expecting it because we're all human beings right we all get upset that our husbands breathe like that like why oh oh my God just cut the br
eathing we're all there so we can just get into the base she's like so right we could just get to the base like the base of it I think the the more Primal you go the better right the better the more like I just come together I know babe we come together a lot but I I'm just saying I think I think that's the way you get it if you can even if you cut politics out there's some really great comedians that don't talk about anything political one of them is we just talked about was Nate brigazzi right
Nate he has a special called Tennessee kid he's vanilla you know it's a vanilla situation but it's very good it's extremely well written it's relatable on some levels you know it's good it's good it's like it's good or or Jim Gaffigan talking about Donuts or Hot Pockets like we're all going to relate to some there's some comedians that have the ability to do that I think they're very that's like there's more power in harnessing that kind of thing whether that be in in Comedy Fest or comedy show
s that are open to everybody and that you have to be almost intentional to invite these mixed audiences and that's what me and Katie talk about you have to be intentional about bringing like that show to Tulsa Oklahoma or you got to be really intentional like I'm going to Huntsville Alabama I'm gonna do a damn show I'm gonna do the damn thing so that's what I will just say I'll just answer you by by saying I think the the deeper you go I and and the more specific you get you will become so Unive
rsal that you will capture people whether they like it or not they're gonna they've been they all watched The Hot Pocket commercials so they got it you know it's like yeah insert Hot Pocket into the toilet yeah yeah yeah I got it you know sorry did I go too far okay um I'll bring it back I'll bring it back but yeah I'll let Katie I think I feel like you would have a good answer that question well I feel like you answered it beautifully I'll just uh I'll just add that I think it's really intentio
nal work to not be overtly partisan political in one's comedy it's really really it's actually difficult and it's a choice um there are some comedians who really do it well um I'll give maybe one example of I don't even know if she would agree with my characterization but let's try um actually Yasmine and I really are working on a project on this exact thing so hopefully we'll hopefully we'll nail it um we're producing a show that's about bringing people together not to talk about political issu
es but to talk about shared values and it's all about play actually it's truly about play it's it's about play comedic play almost more than it is about jokes like set up and jokes like and so um who I was going to mention here as someone who I think does a great job at this and again I don't know if she would agree that this is her intent but I think so um there's a comedian named Nadine farsad um she's on NPR a lot um sometimes she hosts wait wait don't tell me she's really good at that but th
e game Prasad is a really brilliantly talented comedian she does stand up but she made a film in uh I'm gonna get the year wrong but it was um I believe it was a couple years after uh 9 11 and her she Jon Stewart executive produced the documentary it's called the Muslims are coming but what's funny about this film is the little comedic stunts that she it's a documentary so you're watching her and another comedian basically across the country and put on shows and basically do sort of comedic stun
ts but the comedic stunts are all like hey how are you I'm Nadine what are you up to and she has this one stunt that I'm particularly fond of I teach with it I don't do I show the clip of her doing it where she goes to Alabama and she sets up a table with like ridiculous prizes and it's a game play and she says um step right up and tell me if this piece is from the Old Testament the New Testament or the Quran and it's really really funny and very charming and you see all kinds of people like one
guy's like well I'm a deacon in my church so I definitely get that gonna get that right he does not get it all right so and to be for anyone who does not understand the subtext of that the entire point was to say look how little understanding we have about each other you know without ever saying it right and uh and it's very funny and it's charming and it's not political with the capital P but for sure it is about you know Common uh ignorance and misunderstanding but also about just playing tog
ether and I'm sure and again had all kinds of feelings about really doing that work um but the play was the thing and so I I think it's hard and intentional but it can be done and the one thing that I'll add here is that sometimes I bristle a little bit not from your question by the way I think your question was great but the idea that comedy necessarily must fall into a binary of either right or left I actually disagree with that some of it does some of it does but the idea that you know if if
you know the the idea that you have that you're picking aside necessarily and that's the only place that you can go with it I think punching down is punching down punching down can happen no matter how you vote punching down the sort of definition and idea of that is poking fun at uh insta people with less power not punching up is poking fun at institutions of power there's lots of ways you know groups and institutions can hold power but um so I think it's really possible and I think that's the
biggest challenge that's actually something that we're working on the most at our organization is the idea of truly using comedy for kindness and Civic building Civic fabric together and I don't see actually how to do that if we go with politics with a capital P because I mean there's a lot of research that shows that satire that's too ideologically polarized sends people further into their ideological camps and then we've made it worse right so it's a it's an important Challenge and I think it
always is a question that should be asked because of how difficult it is and how much comedy can be a superpower in exactly that way thank you Crystal yeah I mean I think yes yes yes these two amazing women um on either side of me and I think you know I there are moments like I love the idea it is sometimes putting just people in a room and I remember when we did the comedy Think Tank there was what was that Sebastian Conley from Connelly canelli yes like kind of kind of seemed like a Maga guy l
ike a bit like and I mean and he's like on the Reds coming to Oklahoma and like throwing them in and I remember all the native comedians like who did you all bring into this room and they got locked in the room over four days and man everybody it just they by the time they came out like the native comedians they were all collaborating with Sebastian to do their own show together right and it was magic and they actually some of the ideas that came out of that were like some of the best ones was t
he collaborations with with Sebastian and getting it um and so I think that's part of it I mean I think it's kind of the Trojan Horse part like the comedian you reference like three quarters away in you kind of you know kind of flip the perspective but I will tell I'm going to say something that's probably going to be very unpopular but I because you know I am every day living as an organizer and making decisions about creative content and what we're what we're putting out depending on the issue
s that we're working on and I think that we've learned that in terms of an investment and I'm talking from you know as an organizer I'm not going to worry about them because they're not going to move it's there I you know if I've got resources right and all the things I am not gonna like spend our time in our precious resources and the people we're working organizing with to figure out how I'm going to move this group over here that every day I'm waking up and seeing it now but when investing in
something with these Universal themes that it's just funny it's there's Universal things about our Humanity our values and all the things and I do and I think sometimes it is poking fun that sometimes in those quieter moments like yeah that is a little ridiculous that you might be able to move them over but that's been actually a very intentional choice that we at illuminated have made because we went and did the research and looked at the demos about who is most likely to support native people
s and to sign up and to be a part of of what we are we are fighting for and that group was not showing up so but bonus if we see some of them come across because it's just really good stories really good content and really good campaigns we're putting out there how about this panel [Music] [Applause] thank you everyone thank you to the MacArthur Foundation and pillars thanks for coming out have a safe drive home your service

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