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I happen to catch actor/comedian Maz Jabroni when he has a cold. Or I think it’s a cold. You can never tell nowadays. You can’t even have a cold without feeling like you’ve got coronavirus. But a year into the Western World’s most deadly pandemic ever, I finally feel a little calm, a little at ease, like we’re getting somewhere and making progress with the Biden Administration. And Maz feels it too. “I don’t know what’s going to happen under the Biden administration, but I’m happy to be able to wake up in the morning and not have to be worried about a bunch of unnecessary tweets about Rosie O’Donnell, and little Rocket Man [North Korea’s Kim Jong Un], and whatever it is and actually have to like worry about real things,” says the IranianAmerican Jobrani. “So you wake up and you go, we have Global Warming, and you’re like yes! Let’s talk about it or you know we have a pandemic. Thank god we can talk about the pandemic! So it’s nice, it’s nice.”
You’ve seen Maz Jobrani before, his face all too familiar in the comedy world. He was part of the “Axis of Evil” comedy group in 2005. The tour featured four Middle Eastern comedians and came about after President George W. Bush gave a speech in which he designated Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “axis of evil” during the United States’ War on Terror following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The group was given a Comedy Central Special and profiled by media outlets like CNN, NPR and The New York Times. Jobrani has appeared in films like The Interpreter (2005) with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, Friday After Next (2002) opposite Ice Cube and Chris Tucker, and Dragonfly (2002) with Kevin Costner. You can catch him nowadays on his podcast, Back to School with Maz Jobrani, where “professors, experts and successful people from all walks of life come in to educate Maz on a variety of subjects while Maz and his team make the lessons funny.” You can find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. His new standup comedy special Pandemic Warrior is now available for streaming on PeacockTV.
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a torm S S : r e g raph Photo
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