A biography for Maz Jobranihasn’t been written yet.
“I jokingly say that the enemies are children, you know. I always say, if you have young kids, your whole goal from the moment they wake up is to make them tired. It's exhausting. Anybody who's got kids knows what I'm talking about.”
“Comedy comes from tragedy, and being Iranian in America from 1979 on had been quite tragic. In stand-up comedy, I was able to take the reality and exaggerate it.”
“A cultural thing that is funny to me is that every time I go out in D.C. after a show, all the nightclubs and restaurants are owned by Iranians and Afghans. It's funny to me how we lost our countries but we gained the nightlife.”
“Trump is good for comedy but bad for the world.”
“The first time I performed at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, I was in the back of the room doing vocal exercises. 'Me-me-me, my-my-my, mo-mo-mo.' And I'm looking around, and no one else is doing it. I'm like, 'They must have done it before they came to the club.' I came to realize that I was an idiot.”
“People think just because I'm from the Middle East, I'm an expert on the Middle East. So, like, I got a friend, like, any time the gas prices go up, he'll always ask my opinion about it.”
“I started acting in junior high. I was in 'Guys and Dolls.' I was Stanley Kowalski. In my head, before coming to Hollywood, I thought, 'I can play anything.'”
“I meet a lot of people when I do stand-up in the Middle East, and I don't know any terrorists, yet on TV and in the movies, 9 out of 10 are depicted as terrorists.”
“When you have demonization of a group of people, it's easy to clump them all together and not understand them.”
“My mom was like, 'Get your law degree first, become a lawyer, and then you can tell jokes on the weekends. You can be a lawyer and just throw jokes into your presentations.' Now she's like, 'Listen, you need to come up with new material.' All of a sudden, my mom's a critic.”
“Definitely in the West, we're all cast as the same now. Whether you're Indian, Pakistani, Arab, Iranian, Afghan or whatever, you just get thrown into this category. And nine times out of 10, you're depicted as bad.”
“My mother was very wary at first. And now she's come around 180 degrees. She's, like, one of my biggest fans now. Like, she'll come over to my house, and she'll be like, 'OK, listen. I need two T-shirts from the comedy show, and give me three DVDs. The neighbors are asking for them.'”
“I remember I was in a San Francisco nightclub, and I started talking to some girl, and it was like, 'Hey, what's going on, what's your name?' You know, 'Where are you from?' I go, 'I'm from Iran.' And literally, she just looked at me and walked away.”
“It's true that some countries have more volatility, but each also has nuances we don't even know about.”
“Iranians and Arabs aren't considered diversity because we still don't have minority status in America. There was a group of Middle Eastern actors trying to get SAG to recognize us as part of the diversity they should look out for, because we do represent a different point of view. When OscarsSoWhite happened, I felt part of that.”
“You know how hard it's been to write material? Because to do stand-up comedy, it takes time for the material to develop. So you'll come up with a joke, you'll tweak it, you'll work it for six months, you really fine tune it, and now you've got a good bit. Well, with Trump, every day there's something new coming out.”
“I remembered, like, when 'Not When My Daughter' came out, I'm serious, I think dating for Iranian men became a lot harder. Dude's name, Shahrokh - became Tony. Mehsud became Mike.”
“Racism has always existed, and a big part of it is people just not knowing others. I think humans change other human's minds, and it's hard for someone in the middle of America to hate Syrian refugees if they've been able to befriend them.”
“I quickly came to realize that in the Middle East, God is God, and in the West, the sponsor is God - or, as I like to say, Tide detergent is God.”
“I've had people come up to me after the show and say, 'Why did you not make fun of Pakistan?' People are actually upset you didn't talk about them.”