TORONTO -- Did you hear the one about Jewish-Muslim comedy night? The rehearsals were going really well until the Jews occupied the Muslim half of the stage.

That's a Muslim joke, of course -- victim humour -- though I suspect it might have been told just as well, and to the same reasonably good laughs, by a Jewish comic.

More significantly, perhaps, it was actually told -- during an evening in which three Jews and three Muslims shared the billing.

Under the organizational aegis of comic Noam Rosen, this subversive exercise in Middle Eastern diplomacy toured college campuses in the U.S. Northeast last year, often selling out.

"The reaction was overwhelmingly positive," says Rosen, 31, a comic actor himself, originally from Toronto but now based in New York. "The Muslim comics are sort of like the first-generation Jews in North America," refugees from oppression of one sort or another.

Take Rasul Somji. He came to Canada in 1996 from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. At first, he lived with a friend -- only the friend's father was unaware of his house guest. Somji hid in the basement.

These kinds of experiences, Rosen says, give Muslim humour a kind of quirky wackiness that is reminiscent of Jewish comedy at the turn of the past century, when young performers such as Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor and George Burns were starting out.

"I've never seen so many Muslim comedians," confesses Mark Breslin, proprietor of the Yuk Yuk's nightclub chain. "Even women Muslim comedians."

Not so long ago, ethnic humour was a synonym for Jewish humour. Of course, there was token representation from black, Irish and other communities, but the comedy lineup on any given Ed Sullivan or other variety show was overwhelmingly Jewish. And even when the performer was non-Jewish, as in the case of Bob Hope, the jokes, more often than not, were written by Jews.

All of that has changed, dramatically. The precise causes may be the subject of a PhD thesis in sociology, but several factors are easily identified: the increasing assimilation of Jews in North America (with a concomitant decline in their sense of victimhood), the rise of clubs and specialty cable channels for comedy, creating a need for product and variety that Jews alone could not fill; and the emergence in North America over roughly the past two decades of cultures with valid credentials for victim status -- blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and latterly Muslims.

Montreal's Just for Laughs Comedy Festival last summer scored with an all-Italian-comics act. Performers such as Toronto's Russell Peters (South Asian), Korean-American Margaret Cho, Newfoundland's Shaun Majumder (half Irish, half South Asian) and Ernesto Tomas Gritzewsky (part Mexican, American, Puerto Rican, Russian and French) are receiving major attention. And Yuk Yuk's Breslin says his regular black-only comedy nights are always sold out, to an audience that is 98-per-cent black.

"It's a great way for the comics to get together. And there's the social aspect as well. It's a place for people to talk about themselves."

Muslims, then, simply constitute the newest or freshest face of what amounts to an explosion of ethnic humour being felt across the continent -- a face that has become all the more compelling in the confusing wake left by Sept. 11, 2001.

But ethnicity is in, and not just in comedy clubs. Lest we forget, the biggest little surprise movie of the year was My Big Fat Greek (read ethnic) Wedding, with a $200-million (U.S.) box office and counting. So valuable has this ethnic franchise become that My Big Fat Greek Wedding is about to be turned into a TV sitcom, evidence that advertisers are ready to exploit the resource and to test prime-time North America's appetite for bold ethnic humour. The Hispanic precursors are Greetings From Tucson (on WB) and The George Lopez Show (on ABC).

That represents a clear shift in thinking. It's implicit that the characters in Seinfeld were all Jewish and that the cast of Everybody Loves Raymond are Italians. But in both shows, ethnicity is deliberately subtextual. Increasingly, it will be front and centre.

Breslin thinks the ethnic trend may have something to do with globalism, that it's a kind of assertion of tribalism in the face of the homogenizing juggernaut sweeping the globe. "And I don't know how much of this material will remain valid as more local cultures are obliterated."

There's more than a hint of this protest theme in the work of Toronto-born Kate Rigg (half Australian, half North Sumatran). In a bit dealing with the phone-sex exploitation of Asian women, her act features this shot at globalization: "Oooh, show me your big American know-how . . . I want to take your big, throbbing IMF award and shoot that load all over my quivering Third World industry. Oh yeah, daddy! That's it! Pump that economy! Pump it! Pump it! Pump it!"

But Rigg is careful to define her targets. "I make fun of people who make fun of Asian people. I do not make fun of Asian people."

For Muslim comedians such as Somji, it takes no small amount of courage to step into the limelight. "I'm not getting the full support of the community," he says. "Half the time, when I get off the stage, it's either 'great' or someone with a scarf is saying, 'you're embarrassing us.' I'm trying to break the stereotypes." On occasion, other Muslim comedians have advised him not to do Muslim material, "because it could get me beat up."

In fact, Rosen says, "there are still relatively few Muslim comedians.

"Being on the defensive culturally leads to people not wanting to be self- critical. The jokes aren't always directed at Muslims, as Jewish jokes would be aimed at Jews."

Before Sept. 11, he says, nobody understood any of the Muslim jokes. "There was no public awareness of the culture politics. Now, everyone is confused and bewildered, but when they say 'I'm gonna throw a fatwa,' people are more aware and a little more curious. It's very weird."

Somji was inspired to perform by seeing Peters, who is making a major name for himself in standup comedy internationally. "I went in and kissed his feet. He's like my idol, because watching him made me do standup. I did it for a year without pay."

His apprenticeship, he concedes, was rocky. Appearing on one of Yuk Yuk's black comedy nights, he was booed off the stage three times. "But after the third time, it started to work."

Like Somji, 23-year-old Turkish-born Enis Esmer is a secular Muslim. But he's equally willing to tackle Muslim targets. "Osama bin Laden says that all good Muslims should kill Americans," Esmer says in his act. "I feel guilty telling the guy behind me in the movie theatre to stop talking. Where does Osama think I would find the confidence to kill someone?"

Indirectly, he even takes on the Koran, which prohibits causing oneself deliberately to throw up during the holy month of Ramadan. "I work in television. That could be a problem."

"I guess it goes in waves," Breslin says of the current taste for ethnic humour. "Certainly, Yuk Yuk's has a very strong racial and ethnic component. It'll be interesting to see where that marker moves."