Q & A: Comedian Negin Farsad On Why She Wants Competent Leaders

It’s a fact in American life that there is still a stigma around being a Muslim. Due to that fact, Negin Farsad, a female Muslim-American comic from New York has spent a good bit of her career fighting back against that stigma first with her film The Muslims are Coming, then with her book How to Make White People Laugh, and even on a Ted Talk.

For the last few years she has been hosting a comedy-political roundtable podcast called Fake the Nation although as you’ll read in this interview I wasn’t aware of that during my interview with her. I was at a conference called On Air Fest two weeks ago and I saw she was hosting a political panel with the queen of talking about politics in podcasts Emily Bazelon, long-time co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest.

Coincidentally, for both of us, the Political Gabfest was one of the first podcasts we listened to and Farsad says she modelled her show after it. It’s the same kind of format with a few people talking about issues of the day or news stories of the same week except as Farsad puts it, “but with comedians who have no standards and will say whatever they want.”

I listened to a few episodes of Fake the Nation after the interview and it’s a fast-paced lively show with a different and usually hilarious perspective from Negin Farsad herself. It’s a lot of politics and lot of jokes mixed with empathy and those things are more important than ever during this time where most of us are quarantined away from each other.

Side note: This interview is from two weeks ago just pre-shutdown, and even though the issues being discussed might sound like ancient history, they’re still important because as Farsad says in the first episode of her podcast post-quarantine “Democracy is still happening you guys!”

Great to see you again! How did your podcast get started?

Negin Farsad: It was almost four years ago in July 2016, right after Bernie had withdrawn in the Democratic Primary and we were down to Hillary and Trump. So I started thinking about having a political podcast and that it was going to be light and fun because Hillary was going to be President.

So four years later, here we are. Is it a weekly show?

NF: It’s weekly and we respond to the news with like three topics every episode. It’s usually me and a rotating panel of comedians and sometimes we have on people like a journalist or even a Republican operative, but we only have on people who are down to have fun.

It’s weird operating a political podcast like this one because I don’t have any talking points, I’m not responsible to anyone so I don’t have to have any kind of journalistic integrity. Okay, I try not to lie to the audience so that is integrity, but it ends up being a different type of conversation because we’re not politicians or Roger Ailes.

It’s funny too because journalists train themselves to be more dispassionate about what’s happening and it’s always interesting to have them on because I’m like “who do you support?” And they don’t tell me.

How toxic is the term electability?

NF: Oh, it is 100% toxic, there’s no such thing as electability, and also it’s just another way of saying that someone is a woman. So I reject it entirely.

 How important is representation in politics?

NF: The main lane for me in looking for candidates was just competence, and I’m extraordinarily tired of men being president and I need that to stop. But that’s not why Elizabeth Warren had my vote. It was because of competence.

Of course, I think representation is extremely important, but what I’m finding more is that we’re missing out on such a huge reservoir of competence when we don’t broaden the pool of who gets to represent us.

There have been studies done that companies that are helmed by women on their boards do better. The social science is out there. When a company’s more diverse, it does better. When shows have more diverse cast members, they have better ratings. So there are actual reasons that have to do with profitability and other soulless things that tell you diversity is good to have.

Why do you think people find it difficult to talk about politics?

NF: I think they immediately feel like I’m going to say something and the other person is going to be on the other side of this, and there’s going to be a conflict, and we’re really conflict averse. I think there should be a way for Republicans and Democrats and independent-minded people to talk, and just be like, “I hear you. I don’t totally agree, but I totally hear you.”

We’re not taught in school how to have conversations about politics and because of that, we have no literacy around cocktail conversations about politics. I feel like we really should be (taught in school) because there’s no reason for there to be fisticuffs involved in any of this.

Anytime I talk with my friends about what people should learn in schools, they don’t like it. It quickly becomes “you’re not telling my kid what to learn.”

How did you react to the articles saying that Elizabeth Warren should drop out?

NF: That was the most infuriating thing for me to think that Elizabeth Warren should drop out. It made no sense because most of the states had not voted yet and such a small percentage of delegates had been awarded. Why should anyone drop out of the race? Let us vote for who we believe in. This is really telling us is there’s a greater problem with our political primary process. We shouldn’t have this scattered ridiculous calendar where one state votes months before another state. Why is that happening? We should seriously look at ranked-choice voting because Elizabeth Warren was the number two option for a lot of Democrat voters for a long time. Instead, we’re getting these plurality candidates which means most people aren’t happy they’re just begrudgingly voting for whoever is left. I’m a New York voter and we don’t vote till April. If we had ranked-choice voting I wouldn’t be disenfranchised because I would get to vote for the person I actually want to vote for. There’s no reason to live like this.

You mentioned in your panel with Emily Bazelon the difficulty in finding conservative comedians. My question is: do they exist?

NF: I had a Republican on my show recently and he was so delightful and I asked him, “Where are the rest of your friends?” He told me that he was a unicorn and a lot of his friends wouldn’t come on a show like this.

There is a conservative comedian that’s been on our show before named Tom Shillue. He was one of the hosts of Red Eye on Fox, which was their attempt at blending comedy with news.

If Fact the Nation was your regular job, and you had to do it five days a week, would you retire like Jon Stewart did?

NF: Jon Stewart was in my movie The Muslims Are Coming and this ended up on the cutting room floor because it was too depressing but he said, “I don’t feel like that my 15 years of being on the air have made any appreciable difference in the political landscape. I feel like everything’s gotten worse. If anything, you know; I’ve done bad.”

And I was just like, “Okay, well that’s not going into the movie. I need you to fill some people with hope buddy.”

I think the day in and day out of doing a job like that is dispiriting because you know eventually you want to be covering good news and then none comes. 

There’s a lot of burnout doing a job like that, and can you imagine his disappointment after Trump was elected? There are times with my podcast that I don’t want to cover Trump at all and we have the luxury of deciding to cover something that’s happening in the world of policy that has nothing to do with him. That’s been a saving grace for me and the team and prevents us from getting too down about what it means to have this man as our President.

Is this idea of “bridging the divide” effective?

I did this campaign called Boycott Bigotry where I went to Charlottesville and I put up advertising on billboards and newspapers asking people to boycott certain Trump properties and at the same time, there were people that came on a kind of pilgrimage to the Trump winery and hotels in exactly the opposite of what I wanted.

So I spoke with one of them and said: “you know with the Muslim ban if something happens to my parents in Iran what would happen if I couldn’t see them?” I saw her go through the roller coaster of emotions thinking of her mother and what would happen if she couldn’t visit her and she got it.

The bridging the divide thing is real. It can happen, you can touch people at that level, it’s just very laborious to get it to happen.