We twist ourselves into knots convincing people that Islam is peaceful and varied before we realize that, wait a second, you can be a Muslim while also recognizing that Islam doesn't even explain half of your behaviors!

There's something about political comedy that sometimes closes people off, and my general goal is to open people right up.

I mostly want to highlight things that feel like an injustice, and that's not really political. No one is going to - or should - say that bigotry toward Muslims is partisan. It's a matter of being just or not being just. So that's why I started calling myself a social justice comedian.

I knew that the black struggle wasn't my struggle. But I felt like it was my-struggle-adjacent, you know? I've always said that if you turn the dial in one direction, a Muslim is a Jew is an East Asian person is a Native American and so on. I feel very much that all of these struggles are kind of the same and - Hillary Clinton actually said this recently - when you get rid of one barrier, it opens up the gates for a whole bunch of people you didn't even know would benefit from it. So not fighting for the black struggle is like not fighting for the Muslim struggle.

I one hundred percent recognize that comedy is a more narcissistic profession and that I cannot directly improve people's lives the way I could if I had stayed in the policy world. But the trade-off is that I'm happier doing jokes.

We twist ourselves into knots convincing people that Islam is peaceful and varied before we realize that, wait a second, you can be a Muslim while also recognizing that Islam doesn't even explain half of your behaviors!

The fundamental truth guiding social justice comedy is that people are not shitty. That sounds cheesy, but that's how I have to approach it. Everybody has the capacity for change.