The other day, someone asked the stand-up comic Dean Obeidallah if, as an Arab man, he was offended by those infamous cartoons of Mohammed. He wasn’t, he said: Firstly, he’s Arab, not Muslim. Secondly, he’s got bigger fish to fry. “I’m offended by the daily rhetoric of right-wing jackasses,” he said, mentioning inflammatory TV pundits like Glenn Beck on CNN Headline News.

“There are guys saying we should do Muslim profiling at the airport. There’s no religion in your passport, so I joke: Are they going to throw in screening questions? First, they say, ‘Did you pack your own bag?’ then maybe they’ll say, ‘What do you think of pork? ... If I drew a cartoon of Mohammed, would you get mad?’ Maybe they’ll leave a huge ham sandwich at the security checkpoint, and if you refuse to bite it you’ll get extra screening. Then again, vegetarians and older Americans on no-salt diets are going to get extra screening as well.”

Obeidallah adds wryly: “More people would rather fly with snakes on a plane than Middle Eastern people.”

If times are occasionally tough for the Arab and Muslim communities in the U.S., things are slowly looking up for Middle Eastern comedians. The same enlightened impulse that spurred books about Islam to run up the bestseller lists five years ago is now prompting audiences to acknowledge that maybe they wouldn’t mind hearing some jokes about the Arab-American experience.

Even The Daily Show, which is dominated on-air and behind the scenes by white men, has begun featuring reports by the Muslim actor Aasif Mandvi. (Granted, he’s from India, but beggars can’t be choosers.)

So three years ago, Obeidallah and the Palestinian-American Maysoon Zayid co-created the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, which kicks off this year’s edition tomorrow with an evening of stand-up at Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea. Other events include an evening of short films and three nights of sketch shows.

Obeidallah, 36, has been doing stand-up around the city for almost 15 years and, though he regularly does 10 sets a week, he figured other Arab-American comedians might benefit from a sort of comical critical mass if they banded together. (For comedy, one hastens to add. No funny business.)

For the first year or two, because there aren’t too many opportunities for Arab-Americans to hear comedy about their own experience, they made up the bulk of the audiences. (And, Obeidallah jokes, a lot of FBI, ATF, and Homeland Security agents showed up too, “which is nice.” Hey, who cares as long as they buy tickets?)

“Audiences come to comedy clubs to escape reality, and you have people like me who force reality back in their face, and sometimes people don’t want to hear it,” Obeidallah says of his routine. At the festival, audiences are more likely to be comfortable hearing that sort of material. Last year, the fest really began breaking through to non-Arabs.

While all the comedians and actors involved are trying to give their careers a boost, Obeidallah says the festival would be a failure if they didn’t find new audiences. (Brace yourself: here’s where he turns earnest.) “It’s so important to reach out to non-Arabs,” he says. “They’re the ones we need to humanize ourselves to and tell people that we’re not all terrorists, we have no sympathy to terrorism, we’re just like the other ethnic minority or immigrant groups in America. We’re just trying to find our way.”

In fact, Obeidallah finds inspiration in Richard Pryor, who was one of the first comedians to break through with tales of the African- American experience, and Jewish-American comics. (He’s still being earnest.)

“Humour was used by Jewish Americans during times when they were not as accepted in America, where they were having many more problems, where people were harassing or persecuting them, and they used comedy to Obeidallah did a long-running show called Stand Up for Peace with the Jewish comedian Scott Blakeman. And he’s currently working with Max Brooks (son of Mel) on developing a show of Middle Eastern comics for Mother Lode, the growing Internet-only channel produced by Comedy Central. Winking at the terrorism- related baggage that Arab-American comics carry into their acts, the show is called The Watch List. As for the comedy festival, Obeidallah hopes eventually its goal of fostering understanding and dispelling stereotypes will fall by the wayside.

“At some point,” he says, this political moment “is going to wear itself out.” And then his festival will become just one of many that spotlight the cultural contributions of the city’s different ethnic groups, like the recent New York International Latino Film Festival. “I think it might continue as just a celebration of our culture, but it won’t have the political edge to it,” he says. “I kind of look forward to that day.”

Until then, given the mindset of some audiences, if there’s going to be a rush of Middle Eastern performers to the stages of comedy clubs, someone might think about refining showbiz vocabulary. A successful stand-up comic, after all, ‘kills’ his audience; a failed routine is called a ‘bomb.’ Neither sounds very reassuring.