Negin Farsad: A clear message?
By ASTON CHAN ‘22
A combination of uneasy murmurs and uncontrollable snickering emanated from the ACC on Wednesday, April 3rd, as Negin Farsad used a variety of sexual jokes and political comments in her speech as the Class of 1952 Religious Understanding Speaker. Despite the periodic outbursts of laughter throughout the assembly, after leaving the ACC, the student body seemed split on whether she accomplished her objective of promoting the overlooked Muslim culture in America.
While presenters are generally solemn in their introduction and explanation of pressing societal problems, Negin Farsad’s tone was unconventionally cheerful. Farsad is an Iranian-American comedian raised in Palm Springs, California, who grew up struggling with her identity and its relationship to the community around her. Upon earning her master’s degree in Race Relations, Farsad established her own production company, Vaguely Qualified Productions, and began promoting awareness of Muslim culture through performing stand-up routines that were built upon her political views and her journey to self-affirmation.
An optional, anonymous survey sent out by the Paper received one-hundred responses. In answering the question of whether students felt that Negin Farsad’s message was clear, the responders were divided; 48% of respondents expressed feeling like Farsad’s purpose in giving the speech was not clear. One student asserted, “she was too focused on making people laugh at her jokes to keep her points coherent.” Other respondents agreed that her continuous usage of jokes merely “interrupted her message.” In particular, one student noted that Farsad’s visual representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which showed the two states appearing to have sex, “diverted [students] from her main points.” A fourth respondent simply stated that “a central motif that cemented itself at the end would have been powerful.”
The survey also asked students whether they felt the comedic way Farsad expressed her message was appropriate. 76% of respondents said that yes, her satire was suitable. The 24% of students who didn’t like the humor noted things like, “her jokes were terrible,” “it hurt [them] to watch,” and that “there were several moments of awkwardness where you could [definitely] tell she was forcing it.” One responder even said that they simply “[felt] bad for the class of 1952.” Some students had more pressing concerns than how awkward they felt the reaction to Farsad’s jokes were; students voiced their concerns regarding the usage of “sex jokes meant for an older audience” and the “[misrepresentation of] the conflict in the Middle East,” with some feeling that she made jokes at the expense of the Jewish population.
Despite some of the impassioned survey responses, on the whole Negin Farsad’s speech did not seem to greatly influence our student body. When asked to rank Farsad’s impact on them on a scale of one to ten, from “useless assembly” to “best speaker this year,” students gave this speech an average of 5.72/10. 44% of responses stating that she was less captivating than other speakers, seeming to indicate that the respondents were not very impacted by her speech.
However, while some students claimed her address was “not very impactful” or “pointless,” another responder asserted that “the humor Farsad integrated into her presentation made … [her] the most engaging speaker this year.” When asked whether the assembly changed students’ opinions regarding Muslim culture in America, 87% of surveyed students responded that the talk changed affected them “slightly” or “not at all. Although students may not have felt greatly impacted by Farsad’s talk, her use of satirical comedy and non traditional visual aids will make her assembly hard for Milton students to forget.
Image Courtesy of Google Images