Near the end of the Palm Springs International Comedy Festival awards on Sept. 21, event President Paul Cruz unexpectedly took the Hotel Zoso ballroom stage to present a special award to comedian Ahmed Ahmed.
Ahmed, 54, host of the evening honoring such talent as Kathy Griffin, Cybill Shepherd, Luenell, Tom Arnold, Mo Collins, Roz Hernandez and Zach Noe Towers, was surprised to receive the festival’s Comedy Hall of Fame Award.
“With the name Ahmed Ahmed, I can’t even fly a kite in this country,” he said and laughed at the podium microphone. “I’ve only won one other award in my life. It was the Richard Pryor Award for Ethnic Comedy at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 2004. And that was the first and last time they ever gave it out.”
Hours later, Palm Springs tourists recognized Ahmed on the street. One couple was Egyptian, the other Lebanese. He invited them to the festival’s Mary Pickford Theatre for the “Ahmed Ahmed and Friends” stand-up show and a screening of his new special, “It Only Takes One of Us.” The special is available Oct. 1 on several platforms, including Apple TV and Amazon.
In his first special in nearly 15 years, Ahmed filmed “It Only Takes One of Us” at the American University in Cairo, a former palace in Tahrir Square, site of 2011’s Arab Spring protests.
In it, he recalls the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour with fellow comics Maz Jobrani, Aron Kader and Dean Obeidallah, a response to President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union address.
Beginning in 2005, the group crossed the U.S. and also introduced stand-up comedy to five countries in the Middle East. There was censorship: no sex, drugs, religion or politics. In Kuwait, F-bombs were banned altogether. King Abdullah II and Queen Rania joined the crowd in Jordan. In Lebanon, members of Hezbollah wanted to hang out. Ahmed describes declining the invitation and being gifted two Hezbollah joints instead.
The international shows sold out, drawing more than thousands of new stand-up audience members. The group’s 2007 Comedy Central special and digital series became the first to ever showcase Middle Eastern comedians.
“Whenever there’s a conflict in the Middle East, that’s when my career either rises or falls,” Ahmed says today.
Ahmed’s parents left Helwan, Egypt for Riverside in 1970 when he was one month old. His father pumped gas at Shell for $1.75 an hour, eventually purchasing the station. His mother stayed home with six kids.
Ahmed was in his early teens during the Iran-Contra Affair and remembers the house being toilet-papered and finding nails beneath his parents’ car tires. “We’d be sitting down to dinner and get calls: ‘Go back to your f— country,’” he recalls, replying, “We’re from Egypt, stupid. Get your racism right.”
Ahmed was drawn to Hollywood acting classes when he was 19, quickly meeting Vince Vaughn and crashing on his couch. “I was making good money booking roles as the terrorist, the cab driver, the sleazy guy. I called my agent and said, “Can I audition for the friend, the doctor, the lawyer, the cop?’”
“Whenever there’s a conflict in the Middle East, that’s when my career either rises or falls,” Ahmed says.
Although he was working alongside the likes of Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Steven Segal and Kurt Russell, he said, “the typecasting and stereotyping didn’t feel right.”
“That’s when I decided to shift into stand-up comedy,” he added, “to have a voice.”
Ahmed began hitting local open mics and with Jay Davis produced a first-of-its-kind weekly comedy show at Dublin’s, a Sunset Strip celebrity hangout in the late ’90s.
“They had big metal tubs of peanuts, and people would throw the shells on the floor,” he recalls of the venue. “But every Tuesday night, rain or shine, we would fit probably 300 people.”
More than 20 years later, Ahmed’s credits include “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” two Showtime specials, “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show,” “Iron Man” and three years as a cast member on the TBS sitcom “Sullivan & Son.” Ahmed’s 2010 tour documentary, “Just Like Us,” his directorial debut, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival that same year and four months later garnered him an invite to the White House’s Iftar dinner with President Obama.
In contrast, the day before George W. Bush’s 2004 election, TSA agents removed Ahmed from the Las Vegas airport to be detained overnight in the Clark County Detention Center. Several of his stand-up performances have earned him death threats.
In 2015, after performing at Palestine’s inaugural 1001 Laughs comedy festival, Ahmed was halted at the Tel Aviv airport. He says he was detained with M16 rifles in his face, strip-searched, and interrogated for 12 hours. He described the Israeli Defense Force as “inhumane” on Facebook, which resulted in dozens of messages accusing him of antisemitism.
“I’m semitic; I wasn’t saying anything about Jews or Israel,” he states. “I was criticizing the Israeli Defense Force. That’s like N.W.A saying, ‘F— the police.’”
Ahmed’s agency, manager and attorney dropped him. “My accountants stole money from me,” the comedian claims. “Everything just started falling apart.”
Ever since, “I’ve been irrational; I’ve had blind rage,” he admits. Incidents Ahmed describes as “comic drama” between him and other stand-up comedians have gotten him bounced from both the Comedy Store and the Laugh Factory. A bad break-up with a girlfriend in 2016 sent him to New York City for a year, followed by two years in Asia. Based out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he produced stand-up shows and toured across China, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines and Japan. To battle depression, he meditated, exercised daily, cooked himself healthful local dishes, and there was “no partying, flute music, s— like that,” he said.
With venues closed during the pandemic, Ahmed produced and booked outdoor shows in Venice and Huntington Beach.
Ahmed also continues to find balance between frustrated anger with newfound peace. As the closer to the comedian’s special, Tom Winkler of “The Simpsons” illustrates a 911 emergency call made by an audience member after Ahmed asked a club crowd in Tampa, Fla.: “How many Muslims or Middle Eastern people are in the audience? Great, there’s a small group of us in here. But hey, it only takes one.” Two cops appeared at the club the following night when Ahmed was set to perform — and was allowed to continue with his set.
“Is a terrorist organization going to send their headhunter to an American comedy club?” Ahmed jokes. “’I want you to fly all the way to America. I want you to learn English really good. I’m going to put you in comedy classes…’ ”
In an era when Islamophobia remains a pervasive set-up, he’s learned that elevating wisecracks over resentment is his preferred, and often only, path forward.