Farsad hopes How to Make White People Laugh will help answer some of the questions people have been too scared to ask. And get you laughing — even if she did a lot of crying while writing it.The tears that went into the making the book will seem like nothing, though, if it actually gets people thinking. Farsad hopes people read the book and question why Hollywood can’t stop miscasting the limited number of nonwhite roles that exist. Her example being Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Rosewater, which hired Gael García Bernal to play an Iranian journalist. “I’m not saying Gael García Bernal isn’t Iranian,” Farsad jokes, “but I am saying he’s definitely Mexican.”She hopes after reading the book people will start taking a closer look at the racist propaganda that exists all around them that they don't even notice. Last year, Farsad took on the MTA for allowing anti-Muslim ads on the subways by creating her own pro-Muslim posters that joked about frittata recipes and really great hugs. It wasn’t easy to get them inside the subways, she got pushback from the MTA for using words like “poo” and “genitals” on the posters and had to eventually take the transit authority to court to prove that her posters weren’t “political” content. But a year of fighting to get them made (the posters can currently be seen in subway stations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn) gave her a look at the resistance people have to expanding how they view minority groups. “Our commitment to viewing America as a white dominant culture and having the discussion be black and white, is really strong,” she says. “Resistance is palpable.”But that’s really Farsad’s goal in everything she does: to push against that resistance and show that having better representation of what Americans look like now is a good thing. She's doing this with her book and with her new movie, 3rd Street Blackout , a sweet rom-com she starred in and co-directed about a tech-savvy couple who has to deal with their flailing relationship in a blackout. She also plans to eventually run for local office in New York City. “I’m one of those absurdly into the neighborhood people,” Farsad says. “I care very deeply about local businesses in general. I feel a pang when I see a restaurant that’s like failing or something.”Farsad’s come to learn that this kind of systemic social change can't happen overnight, but it can happen. It will just take time. It was actually her dad who helped her realize that what she was fighting for was important. Years ago, when she was a struggling comedian, Farsad called him on the phone to let him know she wouldn’t be home for the holidays. She didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket from New York to California. She told him she felt like she wasn’t progressing, that she was a disappointment. Her dad, though, had a different take on what she was doing.“He said,” Farsad remembers, “‘Oh no, it doesn’t matter because artists are like scientists. Scientists work for decades and decades and decades to find a cure or an innovation and they might not even see the fruits of their labor in their own life. But their work becomes the basis for a cure one day. Artists are like that, too. You may not see the fruits of your labor in your lifetime, but you’re doing something important right now.’”Farsad tells this story with tears in her eyes, saying her family isn’t one for big emotions, but this made her realize that her parents believe her art has merit. “I just thought I was extremely disappointing because so often I couldn’t make ends meet and I had a credit card debt," she says. "And they were always so worried about my financial situation, and I was worried.”Farsad didn’t get all mushy with her dad. Instead, she responded in the exact way you expect an Iranian-American Muslim female comedian to respond. “I said to my dad, ‘Thanks, but I hope I do experience some fruits before I die.’ I hope this isn’t an exclusively after-your-death thing.”