Funny in Farsi Study Guide

Firoozeh Dumas was born in Iran but grew up mostly in California. She attended Berkeley and graduated with honors, and shortly afterwards married her husband, François Dumas. In 2001, she submitted a collection of stories about her early life, and much to her surprise, Random House published the stories under the title Funny in Farsi­ in 2003. Since 2003, Dumas has written another memoir of her childhood, Laughing Without an Accent (2008), and a middle school-level work of fiction, It’ Ain’t so Awful, Falafel (2016).

The main historical event discussed in Funny in Farsi is the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After many years of civil unrest in Iran, Shia clerics organized a revolution against the country’s American-backed leader, the Shah. In the wake of the Revolution, Iranian society became increasingly religious and authoritarian, and many Iranians—including some of Firoozeh’s relatives—fled the country. Firoozeh also discusses the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-1981), during which armed Iranian students from the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line took hostages from the American Embassy in Tehran. The students demanded that the U.S. send the Shah—who’d sought asylum in the United States—back to Iran to stand trial for his tyranny and corruption, threatening to kill American citizens unless the U.S. government complied. The hostages were released shortly after the death of the Shah, and just hours before the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) is another book about the challenges of parenting for immigrants in America. Like Funny in Farsi, Tan’s novel incorporates many autobiographical elements and mixes comedy and pathos. Another serio-comic novel about the immigrant experience, Karolina Waclawiak’s How to Get Into the Twin Palms (2012), addresses many of the same themes as Dumas’s memoir.