A black American comic at the laugh factory on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles is splitting our sides poking holes through suburban Californian lifestyles. This is where you come to flex your comedic muscle if you pass the interview process. Like a gym except you are constantly developing and trying out new material on an audience that packs the room on some nights and trickles in and out on others. Maziyar Jobrani takes the stage. You don’t expect Americans to laugh when an Iranian-American with facial hair tells them he shot a pilot — but they do, because Maz Jobrani tells them he’s talking about the pilot episode of a comedy series.

As he delivers the jokes, laughter rolls through the audience. The genius is in the delivery. Even when he is dead pan, shades of mischief dance in his tone:

“I love those Iranians who deny they are Iranian, they’ll say (in a thick accent),’No, no, no, I am Iranian, me, I am Persian, like the cat, I am not like the axis of evil, no, no I am soft and colorful, like the carpet.”

The laughs keep coming:

“They always show us on TV doing angry things like burning flags, and shouting ‘death to America,’ just once I want to see them doing something nice like baking a cookie. We have cookies in Iran. I want to see someone on TV say, ‘Hello I am Mohammed in Iran and I am just baking a cookie, that’s all, back to you Bob.’”

The lines are tight, easy to take in, and politically — charged and feel effortlessly funny. Backstage, a couple of veteran comics talk about how success and how transient it is, with shows getting commissioned and canceled. But Jobrani has a different take on success.

Jobrani is too level-headed, for example, to use acting alongside Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter as a measure of his success.

“It was great to work with Sean Penn. He was a funny guy and he’d be cracking jokes on set. (But) I count the day I decided to do comedy seriously when I was still at the ad agency, as the day I was finally successful. Everything else is icing on the cake.”

And he had such a good time trying out his routines that he cannot classify the time he spent in comedy clubs honing his skills as his struggle period:

“I would work a full day, then get in a car and drive two and a half hours to San Diego to do a show for 50 bucks and get back home by 2 a.m. to go to work the next day. Yeah, I was tired the next day, but hey, I got some stage time. You just work and work, then one day you find yourself working next to screen legends.”

He first unearthed his passion for the stage at a 7th grade play, but his parents persuaded him to take a more conventional career path.

“While I was doing a doctorate in political science at UCLA, I auditioned for a play and got in. Bam! I was bitten by the bug again. Then I dropped out of grad school, dabbled in advertising and went after acting and standup at 26.”

While Jobrani was working at the advertising agency, a senior member of the firm said:” Hey, you have some good comedic timing. Have you ever thought about doing this professionally?” The statement sounded like an echo from the past, his high school teacher encouraging him to take on acting as a profession. Jobrani told him he was going to wait till he saved some money.

“He invited me into his office where he proceeded to tell me that when he was in his 20s there were a lot of things he had wanted to do. And now, in his 60s he still hadn’t done them. He said if you really want to do it, then do it now. That was my light-bulb moment. I haven’t looked back since.”

Jobrani has had no reason to regret his decision. He pulls huge crowds on the comedy circuit and has snagged roles on prime time shows like ‘Law and Order’, ‘NYPD Blue,’ ‘24,’ and ‘Malcolm in the Middle.’

Despite the acting gigs, comedy is his first love (along with his gorgeous wife). Currently he is getting ready to shoot a DVD for the Axis of Evil Comedy Show. It will feature three Middle Eastern comics, an Egyptian, a Palestinian and an Iranian, from Los Angeles taking on the political policies that fuel prejudice and hypocrisy all over the United States. When the comics take swipes at ethnicity, it is always their own that they skewer with the most enthusiasm. Jobrani is also revving up to move to New York to work on a new sitcom for ABC called “Let’s Rob...”, a comedy series that follows three guys who come up with crazy schemes to rob Mick Jagger, who also does cameos on the show.

The comic often jokes on stage: “People think that since I’m from the Middle East that I’m an expert on the Middle East… friends would ask me if I knew where the next terrorist hit is going down.”

That joke led to an incident that was anything but funny.

A friend who had seen the show sent him an e-mail teasing him about that joke.

He wrote, “…By the way, when’s the next terrorist hit going down?”

Jobrani responded, “I’ve been talking to Al-Qaeda and the next hit is going to be in the lower east side of Iceland.”

The next day Jobrani’s account was closed. After several phone calls he tracked someone down at hotmail and got his account going again. But Jobrani is “still worried about sending e-mails with those words in them.” The comic has not had any issues with profiling at airports but he has some experience with a different kind of profiling — being cast into one of two roles: The enraged terrorist and the ethnic chap.

“It’s an ongoing battle” according to Jobrani. “When I was trying to get my career going and I got a chance to do a Chuck Norris movie in Dallas, where I played a terrorist. I thought I was going to put a twist on this character so they see there is a reason he is doing this. But I got into a couple of arguments because they wanted me to wear a turban. Then I realized this is a Chuck Norris movie... what kind of statement am I going to make here?

But there have been other roles that Jobrani felt had some integrity. For example, in “Without A Trace” I played a Muslim clergyman, who tells the FBI that their racial profiling goes against everything America stands for. And my character was not a fanatic, just someone who had principles.

The jokes may be about how hard it is to be Iranian in America, but the reality is, it doesn’t hurt to have some understanding of the Middle East in today’s world. Marry that understanding to the kind of comic talent that percolates within Jobrani, and pours out of him during stand up shows, and you have a spectacular formula.