He performed four nights at the Club Soda in a show he titled “Ethnical Difficulties.”
“The beauty of this show is that no matter where we all come from, we all have so much in common,” Jobrani said, citing immigrant mothers with wacky homegrown remedies.
In Jobrani’s case, his mom felt she had the cure for his early onset of baldness, and it wasn’t anything quite so conventional as Rogaine. It was a sticky mélange of egg and beer.
“You can’t say no to your mother, so I sat there for about an hour with this stuff on my head. I started to stink really bad. Then I came to the realization I’d rather be bald.
“But the point is, every son of an immigrant mother has a story like that to share. We’re not so different—no matter what our countries of origin.”
Jobrani turned to Iran and told the Canadian audience, “Americans talked about how dismal the voter turnout was for the last congressional election—something like 50 percent.
“But in Iran, we have 110 percent voter turnout. It seems that in a country of 70 million, Ahmadi-nejad got 75 million votes in the last presidential election.”
He added that he wouldn’t want to go bowling with Ahmadi-nejad, “because he’d figure out a way to score 400.” (A perfect score in bowling—the maximum one can score—is 300.)
Comedy wasn’t initially in the cards for Jobrani. While pursuing his doctorate in political science at UCLA, he attended a theater workshop and was bitten by the acting bug, initially breaking the hearts of his parents who had wanted him to do something respectable.
But he soon managed to pay the rent getting gigs in such films as “The Interpreter” and “13 Going on 30,” and in such TV series as “Law & Order,” “24,” “The West Wing,” “ER,” “Without a Trace” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
And Jobrani will be on the small screen again, this Friday night, August 5. He appears on the Showtime cable network in “Pauly Shore’s Vegas Is My Oyster,” a variety show
When not on the stand-up circuit, Jobrani has been developing a movie project, “Jimmy Vestvood: Amerikan Hero.” He says, “I think the world is just about ready now for a Persian Pink Panther.”
