MUSLIM COMEDY REVIEW
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |  |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| MUSLIM COMEDY REVIEW - Daren Foster talks about TV SITCOMS and how he finds Little Mosque on the Prairie a strange success story with Matthew Toffolo. Also, how far TV has come in 10 years |
MUSLIM COMEDY REVIEW
By Daren Foster
Here’s a method for getting a broadcaster to buy your TV series concept that you won’t find in any pitching seminar. Have a tiny but fanatical segment of your community successfully carry out a monumentally destructive act of terrorism, provoking a wildly irrational response from the aggrieved party which precipitates an eventual if somewhat mild pushback of level-headed judiciousness, calling for calm and pointing out that only a slim portion of the pilloried community are, in fact, terrorists. To make that point to as broad an audience as possible, television, the ultimate arbiter of good and sound judgment, is recruited into action. Soon after, TV shows depicting the beleaguered population appear on the airwaves. Just regular, everyday folk, albeit differently dressed but prone to the same loveably quirky behaviour as the rest of us. It’s unfortunate Japanese-Canadians didn’t come up with the idea after Pearl Harbor (although TV was still in its infancy, perhaps a radio program might’ve sufficed)? A whole lot of internment camp misery could’ve been avoided.
Preposterous? Possibly. Outrageous? I’m just saying. But I’ll be damned if I can come up with another explanation for how two television shows on both sides of the border popped up almost simultaneously, featuring Muslim characters who aren’t sinisterly plotting to blow up stuff while deviously avoiding the torturing hand of Jack Bauer. The story’s protagonists rather than antagonists.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as they said on Seinfeld in reference to being gay. Undoing the damage of decades’ long portrayals of crazed Arab/Muslims diabolically intent on laying waste to everything simply because they’re crazy can’t come soon enough. Such vilification has enabled us to indiscriminately drop bombs and routinely kill innocent lives simply because we lump them altogether as the scary, swarthy ‘Them’.
Can television shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie and Aliens in America help change perspectives? OK. Forget I even asked. For starters, both are sitcoms and comedy tends to be taken less seriously than its dramatic brethren, even such outlandishly unbelievable dramas like 24. Filling your shows with caricatures rather than characters, regardless how benign and amusing, also tends to undercut any serious issue you might want to address.
To be fair, the caricatures in Aliens in America were the non-Muslim characters. The show which aired on the CW network for one season, was set firmly in the pasty white, Packer loving, nasal twangy U.S. Midwest. The Tolchuks volunteer to host a foreign exchange student in the hopes of increasing their socially awkward teenage son’s popularity but are horrified when the exchange student arrives from Pakistan rather than Scandinavia and quickly try returning him for an upgrade. As in every subsequent episode, the Tolchuks realize the error of their ways and that Muslims are people too.
The show frequently rose above its formulaic premise. Raja, the proverbial fish out of water, was the moral centre of the show. Devout but not self-righteous, he navigated the choppy waters of both adolescence and cultural upheaval with a graceful poise absent in pretty well everyone else around him. That included high school geeks, bullies, tarts and clique adherents, clingy, cloying mothers, distracted and disappointed fathers, political principles and bored teachers. Yep, Aliens in America ran the gamut of stock sitcom characters. Occasional clever premises and usually tight writing combined with strong performances across the board kept the show from sinking under a rogue wave of stale unoriginality.
Not so much Little Mosque on the Prairie, Canada’s earlier entry into the Muslim sitcom sweepstakes. Traditionally a woeful situation comedy underperformer (except for sending talent down to the States), there was hope Canada had turned that corner with the success of Corner Gas. Rather, LMOTP has taken one giant step back in time into King of Kensington territory; ethnically diverse but stupefyingly unfunny. Like the uninspired title suggests, the show is a concept in search of content, as if someone blurted out: Let’s do a funny show with Muslims!! and everyone started on a script. Clichéd sitcom characters abound, regardless of religious affiliation, although Carlo Rota is certainly the exception, eliciting laughs regularly from the flimsiest of material. He deserves much better. Everyone else simply flails about in storylines that should never have made it past the first pitch meeting. Even when the show flirts with topical subjects like domestic spying and no-fly lists, Little Mosque on the Prairie stumbles egregiously, pointing out little more than unfunny is unfunny, no matter what race, religion, gender or sexual orientation you may be.
Perhaps in the long run, this is the point of the exercise. If networks everywhere can turn out shows that range from passable to dreary, featuring a diverse cross-section of the population, 
we all just might realize that we’re in the same boat, cut from the same cloth. On TV, everyone’s life is sporadically funny but mostly, painfully laugh-free. So you see? None of us are that different after all!
That Little Mosque on the Prairie is now into its third season here on the CBC while Aliens in America was cancelled after its freshman year probably says more about the state of the respective countries’ television industries than it does the levels of the respective viewing public’s tolerance. While LMOTP is a flagship show on a flagship public broadcaster, Aliens in America got lost in the shuffle of a strike shortened season on a struggling, second tier network. American television isn’t through with agreeable portrayals of Muslims as the Fox network has secured the rights to LMOTP. Love the concept. Do you mind if we make it a little funnier?,
If Fox -- home of the terrorist-hating torture-loving Jack Bauer and whose news division had the unfortunate habit of ‘mistakenly’ labelling Democratic presidential nominee Barak Obama Barak Osama -- can embrace the notion of Muslims Just Like Us, maybe there’s hope yet for a broader understanding to emerge. Despite the ongoing and grinding brutality playing out in the Mideast and beyond, maybe television can help iron out the nasty wrinkles that form in the fabric human interaction.Of course, if that happened, who would Fox personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity or CNN’s Lou Dobbs rail about and demonize? The Mexicans, but they’d have to contend with George Lopez. Fortunately, there will always be the French and with Marcel Marceau dead there’s no one to stand up for them. Vive la France! Vive la difference!
READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER October 6 2008 - BVLGARI VVLGARIS - Celebrity overseas whoring.
September 29 2008 - COMEDY TODAY
September 22 2008 - FALLEN SEASON EXPECTATIONS
September 15 2008 - CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
September 8 2008 - KILL THE BATMAN - Seriously. Put him out of his misery.
September 1 2008 - MY SUMMER VACATION
August 25 2008 - PHONING IT IN
August 18 2008 - GUNGA GULUNGA
August 11 2008 - EMMY DAZE - Where is The Wire
August 4 2008 - ME TALK GOOD
July 28 2008 - TAKE THE CANNOLI
July 21 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 2
July 14 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 1
July 7 2008 - THE INDIGESTIBLE HULK
June 30 2008 - KING GEORGE
June 23 2008 - PLAYING ONE ON TV
June 16 2008 - NEW MONDAY MORNING COLUMN - LIFE IS TOO SHORT - Finally, I saw the last episode of The Wire.
June 4 2008 - FLIP THIS CHANNEL - Buying first house leads to having many things on the mind.
May 29 2008 - BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID - The Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers
May 22 2008 - STONE COLD BORING ANGEL - All about The Stone Angel
May 15 2008 - HARD TO SWALLOW CANDY - Madonna is back!
May 8 2008 - THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
May 1 2008 - AN ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT
April 24 2008 - Just TWEEN you and me
April 17 2008 - A Day at the Movies
April 10 2008 - Stop the (March) Madness!
April 3 2008 - Heaven's Gate Revisited
March 27 2008 - ACTING OUT - A great actor working with sub-par material
March 20 2008 - TECHNO ROBBER BARONS - When daylight savings time ruins my taping of The Wire
March 13 2008 - DAMN AGES - Growing up is hard to do
