American Comedians Are Finally Getting Afghanistan Right
After Two Decades of Anti-Muslim Jokes and a Disastrous War, Humor Is Succeeding Where Politics Has Failed
A joke can be the best way to present real-life issues. Comedians can poke fun at the absurdity of the human condition, even take on topics that feel taboo—like America’s brutal war in my home country of Afghanistan.
It took until I was in college, when Fahim Anwar’s “So, you’ve been invited to an Afghan wedding” dropped in 2007, to finally see an Afghan man who managed to do what other comedians were doing. Anwar, who was still working his day job as an aerospace engineer, racked up 500,000 views on …
