Honesty and Committing to the Bit
I feel brave when I’m honest. That’s about it. I love honesty; I crave it like a hungry tiger in a zoo who can never be satiated with the fake nature fencing it in. I got a “follow your heart” tattoo on my shoulder when I was 19, without fully realizing that’s what it was. I got my dad to write truth in Urdu, which I didn’t explain was for body art, and then drew a heart around it and used a discount coupon to get it inked on in Fairfax, Virginia one spontaneous Sunday.
I just thought it was a personally empowering way to commemorate my ethnic roots I struggled my whole life to connect with (a brave act of claiming myself as a Pakistani immigrant in an anti-Muslim America) and, also, I think hearts are cool. I always doodle little hearts everywhere – I don’t know why; it just makes me happy. I hadn’t realized what I’d done until my best friend Amara jokingly said once when we were smoking weed with our neighbor James, “You got a follow your heart tattoo.” The joke really landed because I loved to say “follow your heart” all the time as a bit in my youth. I didn’t even necessarily grasp truly what that meant – I thought it sounded funny. Perhaps because it’s so idealist, it sounded like a bit – which is in itself a bit sad and further makes me realize how repressed I was as a sensitive beating hearted woman. I was just like that, though, when I was young – I’d pick a bit and I’d stick with it for a long time until I had absolutely juiced it for all it was worth.
Not to sound like every old comedy guy in a self-righteous podcast interview, but funny little humorous bits were always my way of armor. The first time I remember committing to a bit so hard was when my best friend Samia and I would get the boys to play an imaginary game of cops and robbers when we were in elementary school. We would be hanging out in some kid’s attic while all our parents hung out downstairs eating dinner, drinking chai, talking about the motherland or whatever – our small, tightly-knit Muslim community holding together as best as we could. When we were playing imaginary, I never wanted it to end. I would laugh so hard at all the bits. I was most enthused and felt most alive when we were all fully in it – committing to the dumb fantasy world we created. I fondly recall pissing in my pants because I was laughing so hard but I didn’t want to leave watching our friend Asan play a dentist who picked up a skateboard and said, “This skateboard indicates the drug dealer has been dealing drugs.” I had never laughed so hard in my life.
Later, when I had to move to a new state and leave all those kids behind, I recall committing really hard to a bit where I simply restated a Verizon commercial that was popular on T.V. at the time. I was delighted that even though it made no sense to anyone else (or me, really), everyone seemed to find it humorous as well. The culmination was at field day when I asked the face painter to paint “Verizon” on my forehead. When she tepidly said, “Okay,” I couldn’t believe I had even pulled it off. I had yet again committed to the bit so hard, I tattooed it onto my body.
Humor makes me feel powerful. Now as a stand up comedian, it has become a sword I can yield myself on stage. The power is sometimes beyond me. It feels random to be good enough at delivering jokes and bits on stage that you can justify continuing to do it for long periods of time. I don’t know why I have this power, but I do think it’s because I felt so alienated as a child I cultivated it to be my superpower. Now with any stage time I get, it’s a gift to get to be honest with people – to share my truth. And in that vulnerability, I’m given the gift of life and connection. I often wonder what’s the point of pursuing art in a capitalist system – watching my peers and I overcome with jealousy and agony over the very few opportunities available to support ourselves in the kind of lives we’d ideally prefer – but I remember, again and again, it never is and was about the money, even if the entire world is about money. It’s about art and art is about connection.