International Herald Tribune By Dan Bilefsky
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2006
COPENHAGEN Omar Marzouk, a Danish comedian, used to joke that he should have been born a poodle, not a Muslim.

“Dogs in this nation have their own burial grounds, and Muslims don’t,” he would say. “So I either have to be sent out of this country in a box or change my name to Fluffy.”

Like most satire, there is truth in jest: Denmark’s Muslims have not been granted land for Islamic cemeteries and have had to conduct traditional burial rights in other countries.

But while the Fluffy joke used to get laughs, Marzouk said, now he is heckled with “Paki go home” and has omitted it from his act.

Since the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in September, Marzouk says, ethic tensions have be-come so charged that the atmosphere has soured even at comedy clubs.

“It’s getting hard to be a Muslim comic in this country,” said the 32-year-old Dane, who is as in demand at leftist cocktail parties in Copenhagen as he is at Middle Eastern weddings. He says the country’s assimilation policies have failed because “the Danish government’s idea of better integration is, ‘Let’s have a Turkish night and watch a belly dancer.”‘

Marzouk calls the Muhammad cartoons, which have spawned protests across the Islamic world, a cowardly provocation calculated to infuriate Muslims. But he says he supports the right of newspapers to publish them since the same free-speech rules that allowed their appearance in print also permit his hard-edged comedy.

“The cartoons have polarized Denmark so that both Muslims and non-Muslims are saying, ‘You are either with us or against us,”‘ Marzouk says. “But surely a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb-shaped hat is less damaging to the Muslim community than a photograph of a Muslim cutting off someone’s head.”

The son of Egyptian immigrants, Marzouk grew up in a working-class neighborhood outside Copenhagen and studied engineering before abandoning the computer company he founded in favor of comedy. He turned to laughs for solace after clients kept mistaking him for the pizza-delivery boy when he came to their homes to service their laptops.

“Now I have become the token Paki at office parties,” he says, “and even some Muslims are proud of me.”

Marzouk is one of a growing breed of young Muslim comics who are using humor, satire and self-deprecation to bridge the cultural gap between Islam and the West.

Alienated from their own communities for mocking Islam while heckled by anti-immigrant groups in their adopted countries, they are sending up the failure of Europe’s assimilation policies in the post-Sept. 11 world.

Others in this generation of comedians include Shazia Mirza in Britain, Shabana Rehman in Norway and Jamel Debbouze in France. But Marzouk’s humor is among the edgiest.

When he appeared at Edinburgh’s Fringe festival in August, he asked the audience not to murder him if the jokes weren’t funny. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “I’m not that kind of Muslim.”

At first, Marzouk said, he was wary of telling suicide-bomber jokes in his one-man show, “War, Terror and Other Fun Stuff,” which ran in Edinburgh shortly after the July subway bombings in London. But the largely British audience welcomed his humor, he said.

Marzouk says terror humor has receptive audiences in unlikely places. He said he was greeted with hysterical cackles when, in recent shows in Israel and Britain, he suggested that the West recruit Muslims to prevent terrorist attacks by having them sit on buses, strapped with explosives, so when a real suicide bomber gets on, they can say, “Hey, man, it’s O.K., I got this one covered.”

If the audience doesn’t laugh at his jokes, his resorts to a favorite riposte, “I don’t care if my jokes bomb. They go straight to heaven where they get 72 virgin jokes” – a reference to the promise of 72 virgins for Muslim suicide bombers.

But his iconoclasm has its limits. During a recent television comedy special filmed near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, he said he had planned to scream, “Hey, you crybabies, stop all that wailing.” But he said the site of solemn worshipers prompted him to skip the joke.

Marzouk says that the ascent in Denmark of the far right anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party has made his life more difficult. “When the politicians are so extreme, that makes it hard for a comedian or satirist,” he says, “because what can you say that can top them?”

Still, he can’t resist mocking Danish Islamophobia. He recently noted on a televised Christmas special that Santa Claus would never have been able to emigrate to Denmark because Saint Nicholas, a 4th-century saint, lived on the southwest coast of Muslim Turkey.

Anticipating his critics, Marzouk has a special death threat section on his Web site where he invites readers to choose between killing him by beheading, by blowing up his car or by firing squad. At last count, he said, 500 people had responded, with beheading the leading choice of execution.

But he adds that he will emerge alive since he has no intention of staying on in Denmark. “I am moving to London because I’m tired,” he said. “Things are too tense here, and it is no longer as fun to try and be funny.”