A profile and extended Q&A with new comic Maysoon Zayid, in Punchline magazine. Zayid has been a subject of the PBS documentary America at a Crossroads: Stand Up: Muslim Comics Come of Age, and has a role in Adam Sandler’s latest goofball feature, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

Zayid will also serve as a performer and delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and her one-woman stage show is being turned into a movie. She does charity work with Maysoon’s Kids, an organization she founded in 2001 that provides assistance to children with disabilities in Palestine.

Zayid is an Arab-American — her parents emigrated from Palestine to New Jersey — and a Muslim, and she also has cerebral palsy.

In her words, she’s the “first shaking comic without a drug problem.”

With video. An excerpt:

I’m kind of like a sprightly disabled person. So, like, if it’s raining, and I park in the handicapped spot, I usually run into the mall. Which causes all sorts of anger, especially from the paraplegic rolling from across half the parking lot. He’s like trying take me out and make me disabled. And I’m like “Leave me alone! By Arab standards I’m a farm animal. I deserve this spot.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 2:09 pm and is filed under celebrities, cerebral palsy, humor, movies, NOT2BEMISSED, politics, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.