Not that Britain's Shazia Mirza is too worried. This is a woman who opened shows soon after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 with the line: "My name is Shazia Mirza. At least, that's what it says on my pilot's licence."

Press reports about the joke brought Mirza, 26, a small degree of international notoriety, and next month she is playing her first live shows in the United States.

"Everyone told me they thought it was the funniest thing they had heard," said Mirza of US reaction to her post-September 11 humour.

"I suppose there must have been some that were upset."

Mirza, who was born in Birmingham, central England, to parents from Pakistan, stresses that she is not principally a political humourist.

"I don't really talk about politics so much as what it's like to be a Muslim woman," she said.

"But they invited me over and I suppose I've got to talk about the war, especially as I'm a Muslim."

She is thus far only booked to play stand-up dates in San Francisco and New York, and will thus avoid more conservative, smaller-town audiences.

"I think it would be quite a challenge in Texas," she noted of President George W. Bush's home state.

But even to urban audiences, hers would be a different perspective, she said.

"I just think people can't understand that Muslims are thinking: 'Why is America always attacking Islamic countries? Do they hate Muslims?'"

Mirza's jokes about the war, now in its third week, do not always travel well, as shown by a recent tour of Germany.

"As soon as I was picked up (upon arriving in the country), the first thing the driver said was: 'We are not taking part in this war'," she said.

"On stage I told the audience: 'Come on Germany, get involved, it's not the same without you,' and some people found it funny but a lot were very uptight."

Audience members are sometimes not even sure what to make of a woman of South Asian origin wearing a Muslim headscarf being on stage telling jokes, she said.

In Germany, "there were some men who came along because they had never seen an Asian woman in person before," said the former physics teacher, who turned to stand-up comedy in 2000.

There was also opposition within Britain's Muslim community, she added.

"There are some men who think you should be in the kitchen, and not up on stage. But then again there are lots of woman comedians whose boyfriends are not very happy about it," she said.

"But it is especially true in the Muslim world because women have not had the upper hand, ever."

SPACE.WIRE