Foreign Correspondence

[fuagf]

Legally Brown: Muslim comedian finds the funny in radical, be it jihadists or bogans

"Cultivating Identity .. Thomas Keneally"

Waleed Aly Date September 24, 2013 Comments 123 [.. YouTube of embed .. ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o1bW61eNsc
Legally Brown - Trailer
Legally Brown is an all-new, outrageously funny weekly comedy series which puts politics and culture in the line of fire.

Probably the most telling moment in last night's debut episode of Legally Brown was when Nazeem Hussain quipped that white viewers would be “expecting funny accents, jokes about the weird foods we eat and stories about my wacky ethnic parents. Sorry to disappoint”. And although he then proceeds immediately to impersonate his mum, he's making a statement here that “ethnic” comedy in Australia has hitherto been about the parading of stereotypes for comfortable, mainstream consumption. He's not interested in that.

This show is not Acropolis Now .. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_Now ] Certainly, that show is an Australian landmark, but its power was in taking back ownership of wog stereotypes, thereby defanging them. It was hardly a show that punched back, even if it popularised “skippy” as a derisive ethnic marker. Hussain is a creature of a different time and circumstance.

"He's exposing a binary world where there's whiteness, and then otherness. Where
white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not."

Wogs out of Work [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wogs_Out_of_Work ] began as a way of young Australian-raised wogs to laugh among themselves. They were lampooning their parents, their cousins, the kinds of situations that arise when a cultural gap exacerbates a generation gap. Hussain does that, too, but his is the world of post-9/11 Australian Muslims. It's about more than ethnic stereotyping. It's about being a consistent target of political opportunism, where everyone from the Prime Minister to the Foreign Minister to an otherwise washed-up backbencher with a view on burqas has you in their sights; where bombs detonate in Western capitals and unrelated nations are invaded. It is an altogether heavier, more politically contentious world.


A voice for Australian Muslims: Legally Brown with Nazeem Hussain. Photo: Jessica Dale

Hussain's work has grown out of this period. The social temperature in which he has been speaking has always been high. So he's not terribly interested in presenting minstrel characters for our amusement. He wants to interrogate his audience. But, truth be known, it's hardly one-way traffic. Hussain is interrogating in every direction. Sure, he'll pot racist bogans. But last night's “Indian Tourrette's” sketch ridiculed the naiveties of political correctness. “Muslim Shore” – with its subtext that we all have our losers lacking in self-awareness – will no doubt irritate Muslims expecting Hussain to offer them sanitised self-promotion.

And then there's Uncle Sam. He was born on community television at a time when the news media was completely preoccupied with radical preachers, and pop-culture was obsessed with Australian Idol [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Idol ]. Hence, 'Australian Imam', the search for Australia's most controversial imam. Uncle Sam was a contestant, designed to embody society's greatest fears about Muslim radicalism. In the SBS series of Salam Café [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salam_Cafe ], he stood for mayor of Camden, which at the time was home to a visceral campaign against the establishment of an Islamic school. He resurfaces in Legally Brown as an unlikely prime ministerial candidate with a promise to “Make Australia Halal”.

It riles the vacuous, like Michael Smith who can see nothing more than a character trying to demonstrate “how funny jihad is”. But Uncle Sam is also a buffoon: completely blind to his own outrageous double standards and the utter ridiculousness of his agenda to Islamicise everything, fully expecting Australians to be delighted by the idea. Everyone's a target here: the racists in Camden or Frankston who know nothing about Muslims except how much they hate them, and the Muslims who spout radical, conspiratorial nonsense and expect to be taken seriously. Trouble is, they often are. Hussain's putting them back in the box they belong.


A Muslim Shore skit from the comedy series Legally Brown.

There's no doubt Hussain is testing social limits with all this. Precisely how this goes will ultimately say more about his audience than Hussain himself. The truth is that – at least on the small sample we have so far – is only confronting because the Australian cultural majority is so unused to hearing minorities speak with such assertiveness. I worked with Hussain for years on Salam Café, reading the same audience reaction and, inevitably, the same hate mail. By far the most common theme was that we had no right, as Muslims, to be critical of some aspect of Australia. We were lucky to have been allowed into this country. How dare we presume to criticise, well, anything? Never mind that almost all of us were Australian born. Never mind that plenty of people shared our criticisms. The message was clear: we were outsiders, and should behave as such. We were not, to borrow from Michael Smith again, “real Australians”. We should know our place. We are welcome, but only as supplicants, celebrating the nation's unblemished virtue.

Hussain isn't a supplicant. Not content with neutralising prejudices, he's throwing them back. On next week's show, he dresses as a range of non-white celebrities he doesn't remotely resemble (Will.i.am, Sachin Tendulkar), only to fool members of the public into believing they're in the presence of celebrity. He's exposing a binary world where there's whiteness, and then otherness. Where white people are individuals and non-white people (a singular group) are not.

Is that edgy? In Australia that description is typically reserved for someone who drops the c-bomb or says something unkind about Don Bradman [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bradman ]. We simply don't have the tradition of lacerating American comics like Dave Chappelle or Bill Hicks.

[ Here's a good one about Limbaugh .. insert embed ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIT-SYVPV8s
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=58647626 ]

Hussain, by his own admission, isn't as provocative as all that. He's just speaking with a voice we rarely hear from a minority: one that simply assumes its place as an insider. His is a political voice, sure. But it's also an Australian voice. And that, I suspect, is what's most likely to offend.


Nazeen Hussein stars in Legally Brown. Photo: Supplied

Waleed Aly is a columnist for Fairfax Media and a lecturer in political studies at Monash University. He has
also been a long-time friend to Nazeem Hussain after having worked together on comedy talk show, Salam Cafe.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/box-seat/legally-brown-muslim-comedian-finds-the-funny-in-radical-be-it-jihadists-or-bogans-20130924-2uavt.html

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