NEW YORK: Suicide bombings and comedy make an uneasy alliance, but in the hands of a small group of Arab-American comics the mixture can be an effective tool for shattering stereotyped views of their community. "I'm Palestinian. Do not be alarmed! That ticking is just my biological clock," Suheir Hammad, a poet and artist from Brooklyn, told an audience at the third annual Arab-American Comedy festival in New York last week.

Hosting an evening of stand-up comedy, Hammad introduced a succession of acts whose material spanned the gamut of the Arab-American experience and beyond, with more than a passing nod to the backlash and racial profiling that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

"My last name's Kader, so if I ever have a child and he's a boy ... I think I'll call him Al," said Aron Kader, a regular at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, who thanks his Palestinian father and Mormon American mother for giving him so many reasons for being a comedian.

Growing up in Utah, Kader told the crowd, he was regularly approached by Mormons suggesting he might think about going on a religious mission.

"The thing is, for an Arab, a mission's a whole different deal. We don't usually come back," he dead-panned.

When he started out working the comedy clubs, Kader said he quickly found that he had to make fun of Arabs before making fun of anyone else.

"Especially as a Palestinian and especially in Hollywood, you don't want people to feel that your political angle is anti-Israel or anything like that," he said after his performance.

"It was a fine line to walk early on and I was really careful," he added.

The comedy festival, which also includes several evenings of theater, was conceived as a way of getting publicity for Arab-American actors and comics, all too often overlooked or pigeonholed.

"There were already a lot of negative images, and we wanted to get stuff out there that was positive and would show that we were good enough for any role rather than being stereotyped as terrorists," said festival co-founder Maysoon Zayid.

Not all the humor on the stand-up night was Arab-centric, but the biggest laughs from the mixed audience were generally earned by jokes that carried the imprint of personal experience.

Amer Zahar offered schoolboy recollections of his vain attempts to swap hummus and crushed falafel sandwiches for the peanut butter of his classmates, and suggested why Arab fathers might fall flat as guests on the conflict-driven, confessional TV shows so popular with US daytime viewers.

"My daughter is out of control. The other day she wanted to come out of her room, and now she wants to go to school," he said. While September 11 was never directly mentioned, its aftermath and the fear and prejudice experienced by many Arab-Americans, especially in New York, was a constant theme.

Dean Obeidallah ridiculed the concern of an American friend who noticed that he had listed the cell phone number of a friend of his named Osama under the heading "Osama cell." Since the collapse of Communism, Obeidallah observed to the crowd, Arabs had become the new face of evil for the West.

"We're stuck until someone replaces us," he said. "That's why we must all collectively taunt North Korea as much as possible." For Zayid, humor is a key tool in promoting understanding by deconstructing ignorance. "It's a way of saying to people: 'See, we think it's crazy too,'" she said.

In the charged atmosphere immediately after September 11, comics like Kader felt they had to keep their heads down for a while.

When they re-emerged, however, they found to their surprise that their old material had found a more receptive and informed audience.

"Before 9-11, I had to do a lot of background jokes, like 'I'm Palestinian, you know the rock chuckers' - playing to the stereotype because you just weren't sure they knew who a Palestinian was," he said.

"Then after 9-11, the curiosity was overwhelming. There was this very positive reaction to the old material.

"It was their perception that had changed. I didn't have to change anything," he said.

The same theme was echoed by the compere, Hammad, in one of her commentaries to the audience between acts. "The joke is not on us," she said. "The joke is on ignorance." - AFP