Funny in Farsi

Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.

Funny in Farsi is an excellent addition to Language Arts and Literature courses, especially those on the genre of memoir. The book is appropriate for all reading levels, and its humor and relatability will make it appealing to a wide variety of readers, from voracious to reluctant to ESL/ELL. The book lends itself to frank discussions about ethnic assumptions, cultural differences, and racial biases, and the author’s tremendously entertaining and unflinching look at her own family’s misadventures offers fertile territory for class discussion and analysis.
Given its expansive examination of everyday life and culture in Iran and America, Funny in Farsi would also be an ideal text for students of social studies and world cultures. Its depiction of life in the 1970s, and its focus on the political crises that developed between Iran and the United States at that time, would make it a useful text for courses in American and Middle Eastern history, and for classes that study the immigrant experience.