by Peacock, NBCUniversal’s new streaming platform, has introduced it’s first exclusive stand-up comedy special, and that honor went to Maz Jobrani, with an hour he filmed pre-pandemic in Dubai, then supplemented with quarantine monologues from 2020.
Performing in the Middle East means adapting to a myriad of new cultural and religious restrictions, and Jobrani illustrates it with his past experiences in Kuwait, where censors not only required him to submit a full script of his act beforehand, but also translated it into even less-humorous Arabic, and then forced him to perform under “a melodramatic theatrical license” since the nation had no equivalent for stand-up comedy.
Jobrani also reminds us that his Iranian family moved to America just before hostage crisis of 1979-1981, so his childhood experiences were even more dramatically different than those of his two children, who he’s raising with an Indian Christian wife.
Read my full review in Decider.
