Samara Bay is a vocal coach and speech coach, so she knows a little something about the voice – not only how to train and maintain it, but how to change it and transform it. Her podcast Permission To Speak is all about the voice, and how we use it to show and share power. On this episode, she sits down with Zahra Noorbakhsh, an Iranian-American stand-up comedienne, on what she’s learned about using her voice, how the “bro culture” of stand-up has formed and what we can do to change it and make space for comedians of color, and voices that she’s found powerful on her own journey.
Zahra recently teamed up with a nonprofit called Pop Culture Collaborative to analyze comedy culture and think about solutions. How did that collaboration come about? Samara wants to know, and Zahra laughs that she “complained about comedy for an hour, and then I got a grant.” She points out that most comedy is built and shared in bars, and the “underdog” of a bar is a “guy trying to score, and everyone standing in the way of that is a jerk.” It’s a comfortable story, because it’s been the basis of comedy for so long, so any audience can understand it. But when someone like Zahra takes the mic, that story isn’t true for her, or many other women – in fact, bars, where guys are trying to score, can be an intensely uncomfortable experience for women. But you have to do a lot more work to tell that story to your audience. So failing at comedy in that atmosphere, with this kind of culture built up around it, isn’t necessarily about who’s funnier - it’s about who can more easily embody a story we’re already comfortable with hearing. Comedy is all about creating and then releasing tension, and “what makes us tense is not all the same,” Samara sums up.
So what’s the solution? Samara says. “The saying is, ‘it takes a village,’ but that’s not just people, it’s also institutions,” Zahra points out. That requires examining not just our own inherent biases, but also our metric for what successful comedy really is, the power dynamics between who is onstage and who’s in the audience, and much more – a complex question, sort of a microcosm for some of the work people are doing in society as a whole.
That just scratches the surface, though; Zahra has a lot more to say about this topic, and she and Samara get into their feelings about vocal fry, what made Hannah Gadsby's Nanette such an incredible comedy achievement, the role of the audience in a stand-up show, how to successfully manage crowd work, and much, much more on this profound episode of Permission To Speak.
If you want to be sure you're listening to the podcasts everyone else is checking out, iHeartRadio has you covered. Every Monday, iHeartRadio releases a chart showing the most popular podcasts of the week. Stay up to date on what's trending by checking out the chart here. There's even a chart just for radio podcasts here, featuring all your favorite iHeartRadio personalities like Bobby Bones, Elvis Duran, Steve Harvey and dozens of others.
Photo: Getty Images