I figured that this trip could be an opportunity to help out with all of this. Perhaps I could go to the Middle East and use stand-up as a way to show men that women could be in control without breaking things, be slightly masculine without the world collapsing, and have an opinion without anything catching on fire. For the women, maybe I could be a role model. By doing stand-up, I could show them how to, maybe even literally, stand up for themselves. Perhaps I could inspire them to fight their oppression and live their dreams. I saw myself as Liam Neeson, jumping into action to smuggle these people out of the Stone Age. I may not have had Liam Neeson’s very specific set of skills, given that my abilities didn’t involve masterfully killing people, but they did involve telling Cosmo magazine and Myspace jokes. Be nice. It was 2007.
I’m already terrible at packing for trips, but packing to go to the Middle East was particularly challenging. I usually pack for every possible catastrophic scenario. I’m the person who packs an umbrella to go to the desert and sunscreen to go to Scotland. But packing for the Middle East was slightly more daunting because the catastrophes didn’t live only in my paranoid head. It seemed like dangerous things really did happen there. I made about twelve copies of my passport and packed a comical amount of lip balm, but I wasn’t sure what clothing to pack, since women expressing themselves over there didn’t seem like a big hit. From what I gathered, women had to cover up most of their bodies, but I also gathered that it was incredibly hot, so I was confused about what to pack. I settled on everything I owned.
My experience in the Middle East started the moment we boarded Emirates Airlines. The plane was very modern, and the flight attendants were tall, beautiful, and impeccably dressed, like the central casting Pan Am stewardesses in that Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Perfect skin, perfect bodies, perfect lipstick, not one flyaway hair on their heads despite constantly flying. That said, I was perplexed by the color choice of their bespoke lady suits. Beige. Possibly the most neutral color available. I had never seen a flight attendant in beige, and wondered why anyone would pick such a noncolor that doesn’t look good on anyone except maybe Viola Davis. A color that flatters no one, but also offends no one. Interesting. Right off the bat I got the message: Don’t offend anyone. Just fit in. Be beige.
Luckily I was seated next to Sebastian Maniscalco, another comedian on the tour. Sebastian became my lifelong friend despite having to sit next to me for the duration of a fourteen-hour flight. I fumbled with the TV, trying to take a selfie with the map-screen thingie, and when the world map came up to show us where we were flying, I made the big mistake of asking him “Are we going over Hawaii?”
I’m not sure why I even asked that. I had always wanted to go to Hawaii, and maybe flying over it would have been sufficient for me at that point. Sebastian seemed more disgusted than shocked by my question. He couldn’t understand how a person could get on a plane and not know which direction they were flying. I was a very lost person at that point in my life, so the direction of the Middle East from L.A. wasn’t even in the top ten directions I needed to focus on.
After fourteen hours of watching prison documentaries, we finally landed. The pilot said that we were in Dubai, but from above it looked way more like a three-dimensional Candy Land. I had never seen anything like it, not even in video games, not even in my dreams, not even on LSD. It was glittery and glossy and colorful—as if a bunch of five-year-olds were given a billion dollars and used giant fancy silverware to build a city. It’s like a Disney movie, but with a dark, unsettling undercurrent. Malice in Wonderland, perhaps.
The most fascinating part of Dubai is the bipolar nature of it: It’s both modern and old world, ancient and futuristic at the same time, everything colliding in a frenzy of hypocritical mixed messages. Giant indoor ski slopes have been built next to thousand-year-old mosques. It kind of felt like the city version of your ninety-year-old grandma getting brand-new breast implants.
At the bottom of a new hotel under construction, I saw a plethora of Rolls-Royces, but at the top of the building, emaciated, sweating laborers worked in the scalding sun for minuscule pay. The juxtaposition of old and new, high and low, rich and poor made Dubai seem to me like the city version of a girl wearing a miniskirt with Ugg boots. This city just refuses to pick a lane.
Although the extreme wealth and caste system was upsetting, it wasn’t why I was there. I had to stay focused on the treatment of women. But how would I find them and rescue them if they were all holed up, unable to drive or read? Do I embark on a door-to-door deal like the Mormons? Or maybe like a Mary Kay saleslady, since the Middle East seems pretty set in terms of having committed to a religion? Should I hand out flyers letting everyone know that I had landed and was ready to inspire them? I guess I was just going to have to really “lean in” and scale the walls of the tyrannical domiciles to find which women needed rescuing. Look, nobody said being a hero was going to be easy.
Imagine my surprise when we got to the hotel and everywhere I looked there were women, but not the type of women I expected to see. I thought they’d all be in opaque flowing garb, covering everything but their hollow eyes, floating around like cartoon ghosts. Instead, I saw women in—gasp—jeans, short shorts, belly-baring tops, strappy sandals. I was very confused. This was not the Middle East I signed up to save! I went to the pool of my hotel and women were in bathing suits! Some of them didn’t even seem to be wearing sunscreen, much less a hijab. I thought I was going to have to help these women fight oppression by giving them permission to remove their garb, but every woman I saw made me turn into a mom and want to cover them up.
I was quickly informed that my hotel and the area I was staying was filled with mostly tourists and high-class prostitutes, so I wasn’t getting a real sample of what the Middle East was really like. Hanging there was like eating spaghetti from the Olive Garden and saying you’re Italian, so I was gonna have to venture out of the westernized bubble I was staying in to actively seek the women I needed to rescue. After all, Liam Neeson didn’t just mosey on over to France and bump into his daughter’s captors at the Auntie Anne’s Pretzel stand at Charles de Gaulle. He had to seek her out. Oppressed women weren’t going to be in my hotel lobby waiting for me. I was going to have to track them down, so I decided to go where all sad, oppressed people who don’t work or drive usually hang out: the mall.