Cast members joke with director Michael Kennedy during a rehearsal of Little Mosque On The Prairie. Photograph: Christopher Brown/AP
Growing up in a British Muslim household, we were never short on comedy - from snitching on my brother for smoking to the mosque mullah who gave him an extra beating, to always having the best excuses to skive running cross-country during PE lessons ("it's Ramadan, we're not allowed to exercise!"). Since 9/11, however, being a Muslim hasn't exactly been a barrel of laughs - though there was a certain dark comedy in being asked if I'd had "military training in the Middle East" after being shoved into the immigration control room at Chicago airport.
But a new Canadian comedy drama, Little Mosque On The Prairie, is attempting to redress the balance. According to the creators, it is "an unabashedly comedic look at a small Muslim community living side by side with the residents of a little prairie town".
Subscribing to the view that humour fosters a greater understanding of different cultures, the series was made by the publicly funded CBC network. The plot, which follows a young Canadian-born Imam swapping his life in the big city for the prairies, echoes the life of its writer Zarqa Nawaz, a (female) British-born Muslim.
In the opening episode, an Asian male is handcuffed at the check-in desk after speaking loudly on his phone about "Allah" and "career suicide". Later on, a young woman battles with her father over a revealing T-shirt she's wearing. "You look like a Protestant," he exclaims. "Don't you mean prostitute?" the daughter replies. "No, I meant a Protestant," the father responds.
Hardly a laugh riot then, and the responses to the show around the world reflect this. Canadian TV writer John Doyle told the BBC he thought the show was a "a bit hokey. I think it has a lot in common with shows like Ballykissangel, Hamish Macbeth or Doc Martin, those British TV comedies that are set in a rural community and celebrates its eccentricities while usually featuring an outsider who's a fish out of water."
Elsewhere, Little Mosque has triggered a range of responses on Muslim messageboards, including less generous ones that dismiss it as an "al-Qaieda sitcom". The main surprise on the boards seems to be the idea that Muslims were born with a funny bone at all.
Yet the reality is that Muslim-based comedy has thrived post-9/11. British Muslim stand up Shazia Mirza had been doing the comedy circuit for a few years previously but her profile increased after incorporating jokes like "My name is Shazia Mirza - at least, that's what it says on my pilot's licence."
We've also had the American-based Allah Made Me Funny comedy troupe who have been selling out venues in the US and UK (sample gag: "People look at me as if I was responsible for 9/11... Can you believe that? Me responsible for 9/11? [Pause] 7-Eleven, maybe"). Meanwhile, American-Egyptian comic Ahmed Ahmed was awarded the first annual Richard Pryor Award for ethnic comedy at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 2004, with the comedy legend describing him as a comic who "makes people confront their own racism and small minds - I see genius in this man".
All of which throws up a series of questions - not just the inevitable (and, depressingly, still pertinent) enquiry as to why there are so few brown faces on the TV outside of the news bulletins, but also what a British equivalent to Little Mosque would be like. Harsher - and funnier - than the Canadians, I reckon. It's high time we found out for sure.
