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From Wikipedia
Medium: Stand-up
Genres: Observational comedy, Satire
Subjects: Racism/Race relations, Islamophobia, Muslim-Americans
Aron Kader is a comedian of Palestinian and American heritage. His mother is a Mormon. He is one of four members of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. He has performed in the New York Arab American Comedy Festival, started by fellow tour member Dean Obeidallah. Comedians from the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour such as Ahmed Ahmed were included on the DVD release of Micheal Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11. Aron Kader can be seen performing regularly at his hometown club, the Comedy Store in Los Angeles.
From Aron Kader’s Website
Aron would like to thank his Palestinian father and Mormon mother for giving him so many reasons to be a comedian. Raised in the Washington D.C. area Aron (or Haroun) moved away to Hollywood at nineteen years old to pursue comedy and acting.
After quickly rising up the ranks in the stand-up circuits he became known as an up and comer. Aron spent a year in the legendary sketch theatre "The Groundlings" Sunday company, and now performs regularly in Hollywood at his home club, "The Comedy Store."
He has been seen on Comedy Central’s "Premium Blend," the Television cop drama, "The Shield," and has been featured in the The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek magazine, and many other national publications.
He filmed a TV pilot for NBC called "Beverly Hills SUV," was a stand out at the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, and received stellar reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Aron is a founding member of "The Axis Of Evil Comedy Tour," the world renound stand up comedy trio that toured world wide from 2003-2007. When they appeared on American national television in 2006 on Comedy Central, it was the first time that middle-eastern comedians appeared together with that theme, starting a movement in the community to fight stereotypes using humor.
In 2008 Aron Kader became the first person to teach a comedy class in the Middle East. He trained college students in Amman Jordan in conjunction with the first ever comedy festival in the region, "The Amman Comedy Festival." The festival was produced by the city of Amman along with co-producer Dean Obeidallah.
Ongoing - The Comedy Store
Los Angeles, California, USA
Call 323.650.6268 for details
January 24 - February 14, 2009
Comedy Cafe at The Dubai Shopping Festival 2009
The JBR (Jumeirah Beach Residence) Sales Centre is now the venue to
the best comedy in Dubai. During the Whole Dubai Shopping Festival,
the only place where COMEDY and CAFE Meet!
The Comedy Café will be open every night and throughout the week open mike sessions will offer the perfect platform for up and coming amateur comedians who want to take to the stage and showcase their talent to the world. Aron Kader himself will be presenting them to the public every night.
Also every Saturday there will be main shows headlined by renowned hilarious and witty artists such as Dean Obeidallah, Sugar Sammy, Mike Batayah, Peter The Persian and the grand finale with Aron himself on February 14th.
From 24th of January to 14th of February 2009. Café Opens daily at 6:00pm -Headline Shows starts at 9:00pm
Tickets: AED100 For sale at the venue only on the days of the headline shows (Saturdays).
200 tickets available per show, so come early to avoid disappointment.
Cafe is open every day.
May 3-7, 2009
New York Arab-American Comedy Festival
At Comix Comedy Club - www.comixny.com. This venue is only a few years
old and is truly once of the nicest venues for stand up and sketch
in NYC. It is located on 14th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues and
holds 300 people for stand up and 240 for sketch.
Schedule: Sunday, May 3 and Monday May 4 - Sketch shows; May 5 -headliner stand up show; May 6 New Talent Stand up show at 7:00 PM and Headliner stand up show at 9:00 PM; May 7 - Best of Festival - combo of short films, stand up and sketch.
The son of a Palestinian father and a Mormon mother, Aron Kader does not have to look far for inspiration for his standup comedy.
The actor and comedian grew up in Washington D.C. and moved to Hollywood at 19, and has appeared on Comedy Central's Premium Blend and the police drama The Shield. He also filmed a television pilot for NBC called Beverly Hills SUV.
Kader is known for his ability to comment on serious issues in the Arab world while still getting a laugh. "Palestinian attacks bullets with body," is a sample news headline from his act.
"I was always close to the situation," Kader says about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "And I always felt that I had to, and I could, do [comedy] in a palpable way without offending anyone."
But not all of Kader's jokes are political; he plays to different audiences and draws on American social and cultural issues for inspiration as well. He can now be seen performing regularly at his hometown club, the legendary Comedy Store in Los Angeles.
After seeing Kader and two of his fellow Arab comedians perform at her club, Comedy Store owner Mitzi Shore (actor Pauly Shore's mother) offered the trio some advice. "You guys are all Arab. You should do a show together," Kader remembers Shore telling them. "Your group is the next one to be misrepresented."
The conversation resulted in the formation of the Axis of Evil comedy tour featuring Kader with Maz Jobrani and Ahmed Ahmed. Axis of Evil now tours the country regularly.
Only strange days such as these could have made possible The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, a showcase for four Arab-American comedians telling jokes about life for people of Middle Eastern descent in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. A mostly Arab-American audience thoroughly enjoys Dean Obeidallah's monologue, in which he describes his homeland as Eastern Palestine, i.e., New Jersey. He also says "Obeidallah" translates as "Servant of Allah," which does not sit well with airport security. In general, he has a few choice things to say about such extreme safety measures as the Patriot Act: "Are the guys in Al Qaeda really going to libraries and reading books? Maybe Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul?" Dapper comic Ahmed Ahmed talks about his own travails trying to fly with a name like his: "I Googled my name and it matches a known terrorist in the Middle East. Right now I think he's Googling me--'Hey, there's an American comedian with my name.'"
Ahmed talks about the modern life of a Muslim: "You know you're a Muslim when you drink and have sex but don't eat pork." Aron Kader has fun describing his mixed background as the son of a Palestinian dad and a Mormon mom: "When I turned 19, the Mormons asked me if I wanted to go on a mission. I said, 'Is that different from a Palestinian mission? Because you don't come back from those.'" Kader also recalls his trip to Jordan shortly after 9/11: "I was driving with my cousin, who was cursing the U.S. but asking if I wanted to grab some lunch at Burger King or McDonald's."
Finally, Maz Jobrani is very funny explaining that Iranians are not actually Arab at all but ethnically white, and that while Arabs speak swfitly and aggressively, Iranians speak slowly and cheerfully, "like they're on heroin." Jobrani describes his nightmare with Hotmail after writing a terrorist joke to a friend via email: "I called Microsoft, and they transferred my call to an operator in Iraq, who reminded me there's a war on and asked me what I wanted." All four entertainers have excellent sets, and each carries the same serious message layered between gags, i.e., anti-Muslim prejudice in America is really hurting millions of innocent people.
Amazon Product Description
In a time when East and West do not seem to understand each other,
top stand-up comics of Middle Eastern descent Ahmed Ahmed, Aron Kader,
and Maz Jobrani take it upon themselves to single-handedly bridge
the gap with an original comedy tour that has become one of the hottest
concert tickets in the country.Special guest Dean Obeidallah , who's
appeared on "Saturday Night Live" "Late Night with
Conan O'Brien" and is a founder of the New York Arab-American
Comedy Festival, joins the "Axis of Evil" creators for
this sold-out, no-holds-barred event that has made headlines everywhere
from CNN to Newsweek.Nothing is off-limits. Whether it's gay terrorists
or the difficulty of flying in post 9/11 America, The Axis of Evil
Comedy Tour blasts stereotypes with outrageous humor.
In the strange calculus of race, white people never seem to suffer as a group when their members are disproportionately involved in bad things, according to at least one Arab-American comedian. You know: corporate scandals, presidential assassinations, Nascar.
But Arabs and other Middle Eastern people “are the new Soviet Union,” until some other group replaces them, jokes Dean Obeidallah. He is a half-Arab and half-Sicilian comedian (by way of New Jersey), and the one who came up with the racial calculus. He joins three other comedians with Middle Eastern origins for “Axis of Evil Comedy Tour Special,” an hour of both gentle and acerbic yuks that flits from Islam to the erosion of civil liberties, to be shown tonight on Comedy Central. The comedians say they see themselves in the tradition of black, Jewish and gay comedians who have wielded jokes as a weapon against prejudice.
“There’s a sense of activism,” Mr. Obeidallah said, speaking of his “Axis” role. He also helped create the four-year-old New York Arab-American Comedy Festival and Comedy Central’s “Watch List,” a new series of stand-up and sketch snippets shown on the comedycentral.com. “We want to show the talent and try to do something for positive media coverage in mainstream media.”
Mr. Obeidallah, 37, shares the stage with Maz Jobrani (Gourishankar on the new ABC series “The Knights of Prosperity”), an Iranian-American; Ahmed Ahmed (of “Punk’d” and “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show”), an Egyptian-American whose name matches an alias used by an Osama bin Laden associate; and Aron Kader (Hrach on “The Shield”).
The stand-up routines are knit together by the comedian Loni Love, playing an airport security monitor who confronts each man as he is introduced onstage by going through a metal detector. Ms. Love — herself a plus-size African-American who plays the part with high-volume vulgarity — takes on stereotypes of both security screeners and Middle Easterners.
For instance, she waves Mr. Obeidallah through the metal detector, saying, “You don’t look like no Arabic to me.”
Each comedian stakes out his own turf in the show, which was filmed last fall at the OC Pavilion Performing Arts Theater in Santa Ana, Calif.
In the special, Mr. Obeidallah says that he was just a white guy, before 9/11. When a CNN commentator said that “Arabs are the new blacks” because of racial profiling, he said he envisioned white youths trying to be cool by acting Arab, complete with headdresses tilted to the side. Mr. Kader, 32, who has a Mormon mother and a Palestinian father, says he plans to name his son “Al” and his daughter “Darth,” and points out the difference between a Mormon mission and a Palestinian one. (“We usually don’t come back from those,” he said of the latter.)
Mr. Ahmed jokes on the show about his own life these days. “I always know who the air marshal is,” he says of his many airport adventures. “He’s reading People magazine upside down and looking right at me.” He imagines the terrorist with his name somewhere in the Middle East, insisting: “I’m not a comedian. I’m a terrorist.”
Mr. Ahmed, 36, said in an interview that he had been stopped or detained “countless” times on suspicion of terrorism since 9/11. The day before the 2004 presidential election, he said, he spent 12 hours in jail in Las Vegas.
“There was a Mexican guy in there who said, ‘Hey, man, are you in for suspected terrorism?’ When I told him yes, he said, ‘Why don’t you blow up the jail and get us all out of here?’ ” he said with a laugh.
Mr. Obeidallah is the special guest at the “Axis” show, which had its origins before 9/11. The other three comedians first met in the late 1990s, after they all had made appearances at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. They banded together in 2000 to do something called “Arabian Nights” at the club, where theme nights (gay comedians, black comedians) were common. Mitzi Shore, the club’s owner, was prescient enough to predict that a conflict between the Middle East and the United States would put Middle Easterners under siege, culturally, with jokes as the best ammunition, Mr. Ahmed recalled.
“For us the Comedy Central appearance is historic because we’ve been working at this a long time,” Mr. Jobrani said. Like Mr. Ahmed, he said he found it difficult to get acting jobs where he was not playing a terrorist. None of the comedians were being deluged with offers for club dates, they said.
The three men renamed “Arabian Nights” the “Axis of Evil” tour, and in late 2005 they began booking their own performances and doing their own publicity. Mr. Ahmed, who said he was the only practicing Muslim in the group, recalled a Hollywood executive who told him, “There’s nothing funny about your people.”
Their first performance, on Nov. 11, 2005, sold out the 1,400-seat Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University in Washington, Mr. Ahmed said. From there they went on to the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco, the Avalon Club in Santa Clara, Calif. (where they added a show), and the Ford Community and Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, Mich. Mixed audiences jammed the houses, said Mr. Jobrani, 35.
Early in 2006, the men set up a show at the Hollywood Improv for industry people to take a look at them, Mr. Jobrani said. Three production companies vied to produce a DVD and television special of the show. They picked Levity Productions in Los Angeles, which brought the show to Comedy Central.
“What I find really intriguing about this is in this new generation, this is the last stereotype to be broken down,” said Judi Brown-Marmel, an executive producer at Levity. “In the same way you look back at Dick Gregory or Latinos or gays, it’s very much a moment. There is always a moment in time when society was not ready to confront stereotypes. For people of Middle Eastern descent, people aren’t quite ready to confront those stereotypes.”
The serendipity and reach of television means that the “Axis” comedians can go beyond the self-selected audiences of comedy clubs, said Jack G. Shaheen, the author of the 2001 book “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” and a forthcoming book on post-9/11 depictions of Arabs.
“We’ve largely been invisible in American popular culture, particularly on TV,” said Mr. Shaheen, a Lebanese-American journalist and widely recognized authority on media images of Arabs. “Now we’ve been portrayed as clones of Osama bin Laden in more than 50 shows. Comedy historically has always been used to shatter stereotypes,” he said, mentioning the “Axis of Evil” comedians. “I think these guys are extremely important.”
“Axis of Evil” has a 15-city American tour beginning later this month, with stops thereafter in Dubai, Sweden and Australia.
“We hope we do get a mix of audiences,” Mr. Jobrani said. “To me, it just comes back to the simple thing of presenting us in a different light, of shifting the paradigm a bit.”