Hosted by Salt Lake Community College’s Department of Humanities, the Big Questions Forum student lunch returned March 26 at the Taylorsville Redwood campus. The event featured special guest Alok Vaid-Menon, international poet, writer and performer.
Using humor as a connector
Vaid-Menon blends comedy, poetry and storytelling to connect with audiences and find ways to engage in pressing issues.
“We can do something with funny that we can’t with sad, that’s why we’re here today,” Vaid-Menon said while discussing the spaces they’ve navigated when finding authenticity and battling political stigmas.
Vaid-Menon touched on ideas like embracing “clownery to reach across the aisle” and shared moments from tours, including the times attendees approached to say they had no friends that “looked like them [Vaid-Menon]” but still found them funny.
“It is not enough just to learn passively; we have to learn in a way that challenges the conditions in which knowledge is created to begin with,” said Vaid-Menon, adding that being “utterly silly” is one of the most powerful ways to challenge that system.
Focusing on identity, whether self or gender, Vaid-Menon spoke on finding space in the world, creativity and belonging. They joked about living next to a funeral home, living in cockroach-infested apartments, to being told there wasn’t a place on Hollywood screens for gender non-conforming people.
Vaid-Menon treated the forum like a group gossip session, keeping the crowd laughing and entertained while discussing serious topics.
“Over the past few years, transphobia has flared up like an allergic reaction, which is why I thought it would be the ideal time to hard launch my career in Hollywood,” Vaid-Menon said.
“It is a very strange time to be a trans person in entertainment,” they added. “I keep on hearing from executives that audiences are just not ready for gender non-conforming people like me on the screen, but they are [ready] for a Cocaine Bear,” joked Vaid-Menon, poking fun at the 2023 film.
Students take part in a playful Q&A
During the Q&A portion, Vaid-Menon encouraged the crowd to participate in clownery, by asking for silly behavior like twirling, coming up to the stage to dance, singing, or whatever students wanted to do. At one point, Vaid-Menon asked the crowd to make animal noises instead of raising their hands.
Student questions ranged from “What is your favorite movie?” to “How do you step into divahood?” and “What does it mean to be trans?” Vaid-Menon answered poetically and with humor, telling students searching for their “divahood era” to learn self-validation and how to be comfortable with themselves by spending time with a mirror to see what makes them feel beautiful.
Regarding trans and gender identity and experiencing dysphoria and body dysmorphia, Vaid-Menon challenged preconceived ideas of what it means to be a woman or a man.
“What is Susan?” Vaid-Menon asked. “You found a way in your life to know like, 17 Susans, understand their inherent complexities and differences because you understood there were multiple experiences to be Susan.”
In this “Susan” example, Vaid-Menon asked the crowd to realize the multiple lived experiences of women and men, arguing that societal standards must be challenged to create a new system.
Art, humor, and self-discovery, Vaid-Menon said, are powerful tools for civil disobedience. They encouraged students to lean into the art of self-discovery, see themselves “peeking out” and learn to enjoy what they see.
Vaid-Menon’s use of political humor looked like an ebb and flow of talking seriously about their past experiences on becoming “verifiably smart” and of wanting to “be taken seriously,” but fighting against the idea that expertise had no room when it went “against a political agenda.”
“I wish one of the things that someone had told me when I was in school was that, yes, learning is important,” said Vaid-Menon. “But you also have to understand that we exist in a power system.”
