I love comedy and I enjoy jokes, and people who have a great sense of humor. I know many comics including many Arab ones who are quite entertaining. I am a friend of many of them and I enjoy their company until they start making comedy sound like some community service thing they are doing.
What I mean to get at is this, comics do not do their gigs as a community service to "empower" Arabs, jokes do not empower you one bit. Comics either tell jokes to make money or becasue it feels good to be in front of people. What I do not like is when an Arab comic brags about how their jokes are somehow a PR campaign for either America or Arabic--that one varies based on location of the set.
I want to see the Arab comics make all the money in the world, I just do not want to be insulted. When I hear them imply that Arabs in the Middle East love jokes and like to laugh, I feel like throwing up. They like to laugh, they have been making comedies for a centuries now in film, theater, and books. So do not act so surprised that they laugh. Everyone likes to laugh, you are not making a huge discovery when you see an Arab laughs at your joke. Yes, you are a great comic, but they laughed long before you, they laughed with you and they will laugh when you are long gone.
This mindset might be an American one, where they like to claim to are the first to doing something, just to help their marketing, ego or whatsoever. Maybe becasue they are the only one who has an HD camera and took it there to film a show some Middle Eastern village. Just like Starbucks did not invent coffee, they just figured a better way to market it.
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