Achmed the Dead Terrorist: The Orientalist Stand-Up Comedy of Jeff Dunham

• In Event: From Furious Orientals to Funny Arabs: The Politics and Possibilities of Arab American Media Studies

Abstract

In 1978, Edward W. Said demonstrated how colonial and imperial discourses constructed essentialising and binary definitions of a Euro/American self against an Oriental Other. While Orientalism existed in the U.S. before the events of September 11, it is safe to conclude that its material and legal consequences for Arab and, more broadly, Muslim Americans have never been more drastic than in the years following 2001. It is against these historical circumstances, as many scholars note, that Arab/Muslim American stand-up comedians have utilized their craft to speak against the stereotypes that wrongly validate these unjust conditions.

Thinking of the world of stand-up comedy as an institution, in which power is negotiated and contested from within, gives way to the question: if so many individuals are using comedy to resist Orientalism, how does Orientalism, or something similar to it, function within post-9/11 stand-up comedy? Taking a recent article by Darren Purcell, Melissa Scott Brown, and Mahmut Gokmen as my starting point, I will explore the stand-up ventriloquy of Jeff Dunham, who first introduced his puppet, “Achmed the Dead Terrorist,” to ridicule and “explain” terrorism to American audiences in 2003. Primarily focusing on a skit from Spark of Insanity, which was televised by Comedy Central on September 17, 2007, Purcell, et. al. utilize humor theory to both explain why audiences found “Achmed” funny and how the clip was disseminated and reappropriated on the internet. The authors, however, never explicitly declare that Dunham’s comedy is Orientalist.

By situating “Achmed” within post-9/11 discourses already laid out by scholars like Evelyn Alsultany, Derek Gregory, and Melani McAlister, I argue that Dunham’s ventriloquy operates as a form of Orientalist comedy. Additionally, I will draw from methods commonly utilized within Film Studies and, in turn, demonstrate their value in the research of stand-up. Instead of assuming an indexical relationship between original performance and recorded act, for example, I wish to highlight—similar to Walther Benjamin—that in gaining mass audio/visual “access” to the past, a performance, in some sense, loses that which makes it a performance—its immediacy, materiality, and originality. Rather than dwell on what is lost, we might ask what is gained when stand-up is recorded and distributed on television, DVD, or the Internet. As Benjamin notes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” film is a medium that usually works to obliterate any indication of its own production as a commodity (233). In what ways does recorded stand-up belie this attempt by, out of necessity, employing cinematic techniques like form, mis-en-scené, cinematography, editing, and sound? Employing this formal and stylistic analysis will reveal how the language of cinema further highlights the Orientalist logics at play not only within Dunham’s material but also in the relationship between the comic and his audience. This addition to the research started by Purcell, et. al. will begin to lay a foundation for the exploration of how Orientalism functions within comedy, heading Robert Irwin’s 2009 call to action, in which he declared, “[T]he Middle East as the butt of comedy deserves serious attention” (“Popular Culture, Orientalism, and Edward Said, 8).

Author

• Dominic Garzonio, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)