Jimmy Vestvood, Iranian-American Hero

 

The Iranian-American community of Los Angeles is caricatured as many things: showy and manicured as a Faberge egg, mired in stifling expectations and crass rivalries, politically inert, with no vision or sensibility higher than a nasal demand to be called Persian. The cliché holds firm in California, and perhaps, thanks to the artless “Shahs of Sunset”, all of America. Until now, no filmmaker or reality TV producer has mined the Iranians of Los Angeles for their genuinely rich comic, social and political potential. 

The new film Jimmy Vestvood, the work of actor and comedian Maz Jobrani, finally turns that all around. Jamshid, quickly minted Jimmy upon arrival in Los Angeles, is an Iranian man who wins the green card lottery, and pitches up in California with his elderly mother, chasing Steve McQueen-infused dreams of working as a private investigator. Bumbling through Westwood with all the clumsy charm of Peter Sellers, Jimmy embraces life as a new American, amused by the predatory, aspirational ways of the Iranians who surround him. Jobrani injects the film with sharp political wit and an insider’s nuance; the background is the story of a community that transplanted itself from the Shah’s Iran to southern California, reeling to adapt – bling! — and yet determined not to, freely terrorizing their children into becoming nothing short of lawyer/doctor/engineer. And the villain is a local Republican trying to cook up another war for profit.

But despite being ostensibly a tale of an Iranian in America, Jimmy Vestvood has a wonderfully satirical sensibility. Stylized, light-hearted, and unabashedly intelligent, a sort of Bend It Like Beckham crossed with The Pink Panther crossed with The Thick of It. As the film opens across the United States, Maz Jobrani discusses his vision for the character of Jimmy, the politics of humor, and how far Iranian-Americans still have to go.   

What inspired you to bring the Inspector Clouseau mode of physical comedy to a film about Tehrangeles Iranians? 

The inspiration goes back to this play that Amir Ohebsion had written back in 1994 or 1995, called the Belind Date. It was the story of this Iranian guy in Los Angeles, a charlatan, who goes on a “belind” date with this gold digger Iranian girl. They’re perfect for each other. It was the first time a play had been staged in English for the Iranian community in Los Angeles, and it was a huge hit. The main character was called Jamshid, who, trying to be all cool, says “You can call me Jimmy.” So I played the Jamshid/Jimmy character, it was such a fun experience, and when we were done I felt like we have a movie in this character. A few years after we started meeting and writing. It went through so many different iterations, we were both big fans of The Pink Panther with Peter Sellers. I wanted Jimmy to be slapstick, and less of a charlatan. He’s this kid at heart who lives with his mother, has these dreams. We just had fun with it from there.

His mother lets him stay a kid. Part of the fun of it was him living with his mother, and that dynamic became a good dynamic, with him trying to hide the fact of being a private investigator behind her back. You see them argue a lot, but it’s what they know. A lot of people in our culture live with their parents, or with them around them, they never leave the cocoon. It’s part of his charm. 

Are Iranians culturally mainstream enough now to command a general audience? And what about the mood in the country? Is America ready to see a film with an Iranian as the good guy?  

I don’t know if the country is ready, but I know that I’m ready, and I know people that are ready. I’ve been in this business now for almost 18 years, and I’ve been in this country 38 years. You see the Chuck Norris and Van Dammes and Segals – they’re so cliché and just gone now. We are in a world where people are willing to see people differently, and comedy is a great way to do that. It may seem like we’ve made some progress, but every time you think we’ve made progress we haven’t. You look at the elections and see, wow there’s a lot of racism out there still. And 20 or 30 years ago, there was similar stuff going on, these topics have been around and will continue to be around. It’s up to us as artists to decide to push that envelope, to just push it a little bit. 

I remember recently looking at a TIME magazine from 30 years ago. The Jews and Arabs were still fighting, there was unrest in certain countries, conservatives in this country wanted less taxes and less government involvement; it’s the same story all over again and will continue to be like this. But comedians from the past, black or Latino or Asian, stepped up and started to do projects differently, in which they were seen as the lead.  If we don’t step up, no one else is going to step in and say “You! Play the lead.”

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What has the reaction been so far? 

At the Austin Film Festival it won the audience and jury awards for best comedy. One screening had a lot of Iranians and they seemed to enjoy it a lot. Another screening had a liberal Austin crowd and they enjoyed it even more! I think that there is a good audience out there for this film. 

Why are Los Angeles Iranians so extreme when it comes to physical appearance? One summer, when I was working for the LA Times, the paper moved me from the Baghdad bureau to Los Angeles, and put me directly on the Iranian community beat. I was like, please send me back to Baghdad, I cannot deal with these people. There is a grotesqueness there that’s very funny but also disturbing, and it’s brilliantly captured by the character of Homeira. But where does this come from? Is it LA? Is it us? 

That was a character we wanted to have, and Niousha Jafarian, the actress, pulls it off amazingly, she did a great job. I’ve always said Iranians can be very ostentatious. They came over with a lot of money, they’re very showy, they love Roman columns or Persian columns.  We love gold, we love Mercedes, and Los Angeles is also a very showy city. When you combine LA with Iranians, it’s like Frankenstein, a monster you’ve created, that is the most ostentatious you can be. You get this bling-bling-look-at-me-do-duckface-on my selfie. And it’s ridiculous because you see 16-year-olds driving around in Mercedes, you want to go smack the parents and say, you’re ruining this kid, making him think this is what the world is. I remember seeing that a lot in LA, unfortunately; rather than kids being encouraged to work for stuff, to get into cultural stuff, they’re being drawn to that culture of materialism. 

We tried to make fun of one of those characters with all the plastic surgery. I call my production company Perfect Nose Productions. My grandfather had a bump on his nose. My father had a bump on his nose, and I have a bump on my nose. Yet, I see no reason to change that, it’s part of you. Whatever God gave you is perfect, so I called it Perfect Nose Productions. When I see young people going and doing all this face stuff, it’s heartbreaking, they’re lost.  

How autobiographical is this? Did anyone try to make you marry a Homeira?

There was some exaggeration. We squeezed some pictures of my father and grandfather into the décor of Jimmy’s house. In Jimmy’s struggle of wanting to become a PI, I could make an analogy to my desire to be an actor and comedian. There was no way my parents wanted me to do that. As for Jimmy, he’s just got these pipe dreams. So one of the messages is, go for your dream. Stop caring about the community. This is the situation he falls into with Homayoun, and Jimmy tells him, “just live your life, if you’re gay be gay.” The community we’re a part of puts a lot of pressure on young people to be what they want them to be. The parents think the community cares, but no one’s ever figured out who this community was, but the pressure was still there. Parents say “don’t ruin our aberoo” [dignity]. That pressure is something Jimmy has to live with, and there’s some autobiographical motivation to that. 

What really strikes me about your humor is that it’s super political, but not at all bitter. In a comedian is that temperament or skill? 

I think it’s my temperament. I’ve always been a nice person. I don’t get too angry with anybody or anything. If I hear Ted Cruz or Trump being an idiot, on stage I know I have to make it funny. If I preach my opinion but there’s no punch line, I’ve lost the audience.

There was that bit about my mother, when I recount her talking about Trump and saying “I like him because he says what’s on his mind.” It shows an Iranian lady fell for the allure of Trump. So I turned it in into a joke, with me saying “He’s anti-immigrant. If he becomes president your relatives won’t be allowed into the United States,” and she says, “I don’t like them anyway.”

That’s me taking that instance with my mother and making it something that even if a Trump supporter was watching, they’d laugh at the fact that this Iranian lady liked Trump. I’m not an angry person. I’m not going to get up there to be angry. But I’m also going to try to show my point of view, and that’s very liberal. It has taken me 15 years to be comfortable saying that on stage. I used to be afraid of alienating some of my audience. But I realized the more clear your point of view becomes, the happier you are on stage, and the more you connect with your hardcore audience. 

I enjoyed the Steve McQueen jokes, they really brought me back to my childhood. Why are Iranians so obsessed with Steve McQueen?

I think he was so cool, so good looking. I was talking to a film director in Holland who had been a teenager in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and they used to bring all these kids to the cinema and screen Rambo movies for them. After the screenings they would tell these kids to enlist, and the kids were so excited by this that fights would break out. It’s amazing how impressionable young people can be, and how much you can export a culture of cool that people around the world want. Not just Iran, but other parts of the world, if you mention Steve McQueen, people say, “that guy was so good.” It’s a generational thing too. Mention it to 20-year-olds and they don’t know what you’re talking about. But back then Jamshid had fallen in love with those films, and though he doesn’t have the hair, the look, the style or any of it, it’s still what inspired him, even if he’s far from it. America does such a good job of exporting its culture. Today it might be Mission Impossible or some superhero that people everywhere are watching and want to be like. But the Steve McQueen effect is a powerful one. 

Where did you grow up? 

I was born in Tehran, and we moved to Marin when I was six. I went to UC Berkeley, started a PhD program in political science at UCLA, then dropped out right away. I started doing plays and it took me a few years to convince myself that I don’t have to live my life for my parents, so I started pursuing acting and comedy. I was 26 when I decided to go for it. 

Do you think Dayee Jan Napelone (My Uncle Napoleon) is funny? What is Iranian humor? 

I haven’t seen that much of it, but I like the political aspect of it. I think there might be a little bit of that type of humor in our blood. Any comedy that has social commentary speaks to me. It’s why I like Richard Prior and those guys. Iranian comedy has lots of political undertones. When we had one of our first versions of the Jimmy character, I had tried to avoid making it too political. But I gave it to a writer friend to give it a read, and he said, why don’t you guys make it more political, add the stuff you talk about in your stand-up? It really helped change the plot to this Republican conspiracy to start a war. And though in the film it seems crazy and over the top, you could make the argument that the Iraq War was something like this. This is part of the backdrop of political humor. In humor there’s a sly form of dissent. 

What is most misunderstood about Iranians? 

You and I live in a world where we’re mingling with smart people who know Iran is not all about evil mullahs. But people still have no idea. At the White House Nowruz celebration, I was asked if I wanted to do a little five-minute introduction for the first lady. I said of course and I got to introduce Michelle Obama. It was one of the coolest moments of my life. She came on, hugged me, and someone did a piece on it for USA Today. As I was tweeting that this was a real highlight of my life, I saw one of the comments under the article and it said the Obamas are sidling up to the Muslims. But Nowruz isn’t even a Muslim holiday! There are still a lot of people who don’t know who we are, who don’t care to know, and I think comedy is a great way to break that. Comedy is a great way to effect somebody without them knowing they are laughing at something they consider to be the enemy. There’s something very subversive in that. In certain circles we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go. 

I see that about comedy. I see fiction operating similarly. People think they’re being told a story and suspend their bias. 

We did an Indigogo campaign trying to raise money for the film a couple of years back. We had this fundraiser in Silicon Valley and had people sponsor the event by putting money into the campaign. Someone in the community sent an email to the sponsors who were doing the fundraiser and badmouthed the project, saying that if Maz wants to do something that will really helps us he should do projects based on our history and culture. As I was reading it I thought: this guy is so clueless. If he wants to do a movie about our history, he should; why is he trying to criticize what I’m doing? I firmly believe that comedy can change hearts and minds and that’s what I am setting out to do.

We make so much more progress through comedy than something that just shows our history, which would be something only Iranians are going to watch. Nobody outside us is going to want to see it. But it’s interesting that some some people don’t see the reality that the way to get to peoples’ hearts is though comedy, fiction, sports. There’s this Iranian who used to play basketball for the Memphis Grizzlies, Hamed Haddadi. When I was in Memphis we went out for drinks and at the bar, this Tennessee southerner came up, excited, and said, “Haddadi you did a great job last night.” I told him, do you know how much more you’re doing for East-West relations than any politician?

Do you say Persian or Iranian? 

I used to be very careful, trying not to hide behind the term Persian. Now I mix back and forth. I stopped really caring about hiding behind it; it comes and goes. If anyone asks what I am, I say Iranian-American. 

Who is your favorite Iranian hero? 

Jimmy Vestvood. We created one — he’s a bumbling hero but he ends up saving the world.  

What’s your favorite Iranian food?

Ghorme-sabzi. 

There’s a scene in the film where Jimmy is at a flag burning, and he says “Ya Ali,” which gets translated as “Help me God.” Maybe I’ve been working on ISIS too much, but do you realize you can get in trouble for that?! 

Well it’s trying to figure out how you convey to Americans what he’s saying. What would you say instead? Help me, oh my prophet Ali? It’s a kind of colloquializing of what he’s saying, that’s what the intention is. 

If you were shipwrecked on a desert island and could only take one book with you, what would it be? 

If I have only one book, I’m going to be bored once I’ve read it. So I’d take one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, the ones that go on forever and you can keep circling through. That way I can keep myself entertained until I’m rescued.