"Most of you," says Azhar Usman, who looks as if he might be a mullah on sabbatical, "have never seen somebody who looks like me smile before." From behind his thick black beard, he grins, and we grin.
This touring show from the US stars three stand-ups whose jokes show that there is no disconnect between comedy and the Qur'an. "We want you to clap," the MC, Preacher Moss, tells the largely Muslim audience, "like it's the end of Ramadan and you can eat again."
So is this a comedy feast? It certainly serves up laughs, first from Moss, an African-American convert to Islam. "I stopped drinking, I started hanging out with guys. I stopped chasing women. My mom didn't think I was Muslim - she thought I was gay." Azhar Usman believes that "Muslims need to do a better job of explaining ourselves": witness the employee who wants a day off for Eid, but can't tell his boss which day it needs to be. Small wonder at violent stereotypes of Islam, says Usman, when some of its followers' public response to the Danish cartoon row was, "Islam means peace. And if you don't believe me, I'll kill you."
But the funniest of the three, Mohammed Amer, challenges those stereotypes simply by being big and cuddly. Amer has shades of a burly Lee Evans about him, fidgeting around the capacious stage ("This is a lot of room for a Palestinian!") as he recounts his anxiety when his nine-year-old nephew Osama disappeared in Wal-Mart and "I couldn't call for him!"
There is not enough here to persuade this secular onlooker that religion is wholly a laughing matter. Both Moss and Usman raise the subject of women's status in Islam, but their jokes evade rather than address the issue ("The media says Muslim men are terrorists and Muslim women are oppressed. Have these people ever been in a Muslim household? It's the other way round.") Indeed, there is a lot of "take my wife" style humour, suggesting an unlikely parallel between 21st-century Islam and 1970s UK sitcoms.
But there is also goodwill and generosity of spirit in the show. Allah Made Me Funny achieves its declared purpose: to prove that Islam has a sense of humour.
· At Royal Northern College, Manchester (0161-907 5555), tonight. Then touring.
