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An Admissions Officer Walks into a Comedy
Club… STEP INTO TISSA HAMI'S SMALL OFFICE, tucked up on the third floor of the Eliot building, and you’d be hard pressed to find any clues that this admissions coordinator by day is a budding stand-up comedian by night. No whoopee cushion on the chair where prospective students sit and ask questions about the Kennedy School. No posters of Margaret Cho. No wind-up teeth or punching nun puppets lining the windowsill. There is, however, a joke bowl — a round glass container about the size of a cantaloupe with a handful of small pink and yellow Post-Its coating the bottom. Hami says she tries hard to keep her work separate from her comedy, which she’s been doing for about a year, but the next big joke could be anywhere. “My co-workers gave it to me to write down ideas during the day,” she says, pulling out a pink piece. “Visiting a friend at hospital. Go over whole sequence.” She scrunches her eyebrows and laughs. “I’m sure when I wrote this, I knew what I was thinking, but now I can’t remember. This is the danger of the joke bowl.” In truth, Hami’s biggest source for material doesn’t come from the bowl, but from her own life as an Iranian-born woman who grew up in America in a white suburb of Boston. For years, her friends had been telling her she was funny and that she should do something about it. She followed the good daughter path, though, getting Ivy League degrees from Brown and Columbia. Eventually she landed a “proper job” on Wall Street. Then September 11 hit and Muslims were all over the news — visible, but in all the wrong ways, she says. “After 9/11, I wanted to use my voice. One thing I always had was being funny. After that, my friends said, ‘Do it — now.’” She left Wall Street, got a job at the Kennedy School, and last year, signed up for a comedy class at the local adult education center. She’s been doing stand-up ever since. Today, as far as she knows, she’s the only female Muslim comic in the country. In her day-to-day life, she doesn’t wear a veil — controversial to some — but she does onstage. “I take it off part way through when I have longer sets,” she says. “I joke that I just want to show off my hot body.” Laugh, provoke — Hami tries to do both, but more important, she tries to get people thinking about Muslim stereotypes, particularly of Muslim women. One night at the Comedy Stop, a small club inside the Hong Kong restaurant in Harvard Square, she peers out from the veil and starts her gig, which runs about six minutes. “It’s hard being Muslim in this country,” she says. “I have to put up with a lot of weird comments like ‘Go home!’” She pauses and scans the crowd. “Go home? What? Lexington?” She tries out other new material — something encouraged on Sundays when the crowds are smaller. There’s a bit about the curiosity people have with her name. Another joke pokes fun at the Girl Scout leader who tried to explain “camping” to her. The material is smart — not your typical “ha ha” humor. The response is lukewarm, similar to what the other performers that night faced, with the audience more interested in their wontons than the comedy. “That was my 97th show in less than a year. It was one of the fifth worst. The energy just wasn’t in the room.” Overall, though, Hami says her new comic career has exceeded all expectations. She’s become a regular at hot clubs around town. The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune have profiled her. She’s been recruited to speak at a diversity fundraiser in New Hampshire. Comedian Jimmy Tingle personally called her to perform at his club. And one night after a show, an NBC executive told her she was “onto something.” She hopes that one day, when she’s clocked more hours on stage, she’ll inspire other young women to follow her path. “I’ve thought about starting a nonprofit called Stand Up for Yourself, where women use stand-up as a form of empowerment and have it be okay,” she says. “Growing up, I thought no one wanted to hear what I had to say. Now people are listening. It’s powerful and humbling. You can get away with saying anything — as long as it’s funny.” — LH
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JFK AND BEYOND