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First Generation

First Generation American Humor Firoozeh Dumas and Sandra Tsing Loh

ABOUT 

  • ABOUT Firoozeh Dumas

    Firoozeh Dumas was born in Abadan, Iran and moved to Southern California in the 1970s. She is the author of the bestseller Funny in Farsi (a finalist for the PEN/USA and Audie Award). Dumas's commentaries have been broadcast on NPR and published in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and Lifetime Magazine. Her one-woman show, Laughing Without an Accent, opened to sold out audiences. Her memoir, Laughing Without an Accent, was published in 2008.

    Profile
  • ABOUT Sandra Tsing Loh

    Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer and performer, is the author of Mother on Fire (2008), a comic memoir of her struggle to find a school in Los Angeles for her child to attend. She has been a regular commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition and Chicago Public Radio's This American Life. American Public Media's Marketplace broadcasts her monthly segment, "The Loh Down." She is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly. Profile
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Recorded on November 15, 2009.

Part performance and part conversation, this program will follow two of the country’s premier women humorists as they train their exquisitely particular ethnic vantages on such knotty topics as race, religion, and the cultural conundrums of immigrant life. Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian-American, at Home and Abroad will recount how a girl from Abadan ended up as a comic writer in America, a country where the words “Iran” and “humor” rarely find their way into the same sentence.

Writer and public radio regular Sandra Tsing Loh will perform “My Father’s Chinese Wives,” a short selection from her off-Broadway solo show Aliens in America, a darkly comic and semiautobiographical tale of growing up in your typical middle-class Chinese-German household in southern California.

Presented in partnership with Silk Road Theatre Project

Teachers Guide

The Chicago Humanities Festival has prepared a teachers' guide for this program. Download the study guide for this program now.

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