This story aired in the April 28, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
It’s a scary time for many immigrants in this country right now. From legal residents being illegally deported to international students being arrested for speaking out. It may feel weird to be turning to humor, but for some comedians, it’s actually the perfect time to do just that.
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IIBA - Comedy Night
It’s a year ago, almost to the date, and I’m at San Francisco’s Presidio Theatre. It’s packed. Everyone is here to see a lineup of comedians, but this isn’t your average comedy show. This event is hosted yearly by the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, a non-profit that provides legal services to immigrants, and tonight they’ve invited comedian Negin Farsad to host.
I’m sitting here enjoying myself, but I’m also thinking, immigration is not a funny topic. With the large turn-out tonight though, plus the money being raised, this makes me wonder: can comedy serve as a tool for social change? I ask this to Negin Farsad behind the stage. She says, absolutely. “ I think that there's ways of like talking about social issues and shedding light on them, that's fun and well intended. I think if you approach people with good intentions, even if the comedy is biting, it still comes through. The good intentions still come through”.
Negin considers herself a social justice comedian. A lot of her material centers her Iranian-American identity. She uses humor to combat Islamophobia. “I feel like part of what's wrong with so much of American culture right now is a lack of exposure,” she says. “We're all in our silos. Comedy is really a way of bringing people together.”
It’s also a less confrontational way to expose people to different ideas. “It's so much harder to be mean and angry at someone who's like coming at you with, like basically a chocolate chip cookie's worth of happiness, you know what I mean?”
Negin doesn’t think she’s going to change people, she just wants to put tiny chinks in their armor. She’s part of a larger movement for social change, telling one joke at a time, and she’s not alone.
Baruch Porras Hernandez
Baruch Porras Hernandez is a writer, actor, and comedian in San Francisco. He’s performed stand-up in the Bay Area for over a decade, at places like the Eagle’s Comedy Open Mic for Women and Queer folks. Baruch and his family moved here from Mexico when he was just a kid. He says, growing up as an immigrant inspires his comedy “A lot of my immigrant experience, whenever tragedy happened, I saw my parents joking to each other to be able to move on to the next day.”
His parents walked on eggshells, fearful of the potential of deportation. “They definitely had friends and coworkers who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and would suddenly like to disappear in the middle of the night or in the middle of the day. And then the community would have to find a way to, like, adjust and grieve and move on."
Baruch quickly learned, you can’t run away from pain, but you can laugh at it. “I feel like it's helped me not only deal with pain, I feel the ability to be funny makes me braver.”
Like this one time, Baruch was in front of a Whole Foods, talking on the phone with his father when a cop car drove onto the sidewalk, cutting Baruch’s path. “So that scares me. I turn around and another cop car drives onto the sidewalk to keep me from retreating,” Baruch says.
When the cops approached him, they let him know he was stopped because he fit the profile of a man who was reported outside of a nearby restaurant screaming and making people feel unsafe. They told Baruch the man was tall with a beard, to which Baruch replied, “He sounds adorable.” This baffled the cops, so he cracked another joke, asking if the dangerous suspect was also wearing a Marvel Comics t-shirt like he was. He says, “They all started laughing, like every cop started laughing.” They withdrew their weapons.
Baruch used humor that day to get out of a dangerous situation. Comedy is a powerful tool for resilience, but it can also be exhausting, whether it’s deescalating interactions with cops or fighting to humanize immigrants.
“I just wanna do poems about waffles and making out with men,” he says, “but I'm often having to be like, ‘Hi everyone, please don't take away our rights. We mean you no harm.’” Baruch has gotten creative over the years, using standup to do both.
Comedy and Free Speech
However, today, his art faces a different challenge. Baruch is working with a theatre company to produce a one hour show that celebrates his queer immigrant identity. “ We unfortunately had to take a lot of the content out of it, a lot of the political stuff, a lot of the reaction to everything that's happening in the world and in the news. We decided to veer away from it.” This decision was mostly to keep the theatre staff and audiences safe.
The current political climate, with its threat to immigration rights and free speech, has created an environment where artists must consider the potential consequences of their work. Darren Zook is a professor of Political Science and Global Studies at UC Berkeley who says, “It's very clear that the new administration is really trying to restrict, if not the actual space in which we can say things, at least to create an environment in which people do feel afraid to speak their minds.”
Darren adds, “We all lose when we start losing humor. If we lose comedy, even if we lose the ability to laugh, if we're not telling the jokes that we want to tell, it's really a part of democratic backsliding.”
If we start to restrict speech, we lose things like comedy and humor is a powerful tool. It promotes critical thinking, it challenges power structures, and it heals and unites communities. As Darren points out, “If you're in a crowd of people, if you're an immigrant comedian or any comedian, you're helping to heal because there's that power of knowing you're not alone. When you laugh with others, there's like an emotional high that you feel, and I think that's the kind of power that can help get you through trauma. It can help you break out of the sadness of the moment you're in.”
For Baruch, the stage is a place where he can feel this kind of shared electric energy. “I love it when I’m at a show and I go, ‘How many immigrants do we have in the house tonight?’ And all these people just start screaming proudly.”
While he treads lightly as we laugh through the political landscape we live in, artists like Baruch and Negin continue to make art, risking their livelihoods. Baruch’s mom always reminds him that immigrants have been under attack for a long time, it’s not just this administration. She tells him, “We've always had monsters like this in our lives. You work really hard, you survive, and then you tell your jokes at night. If you make it through the night, tell your jokes, tell your stories, make love because otherwise, why? What else are we doing? Why are we here?”
Baruch says his parents risked everything to come here, so he’ll do everything in his power to enjoy it.
