How Comedian Zainab Johnson Went From Basketball Star To 'Hijabs Off'

ZAINAB JOHNSON never intended to be a comedian. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Harlem with her 12 siblings, she was neither the family joker nor the class clown.

“I've always considered myself a very serious person,” he says. “I'm the person who gets annoyed by the class clown, and that's the funny thing for me: The class clown will get on my nerves and I'll tell everyone and imitate him.”

But around age 10, her mother snuck her to Harlem's Uptown Comedy Club to see her first stand-up show. Her mom's decision to bring Johnson was random — she could have taken her husband or one of Johnson's four older brothers — but she chose her. When Johnson tells me about the journey that became the first of many steps that led to a career in comedy, it's as if she was always meant to be on stage.

Now, two decades later, Johnson has performed stand-up at local clubs across the country, is a regular on the Amazon sci-fi comedy-drama series Upload, and co-hosts the quirky Netflix documentary series 100 Humans: Life's Questions, Answers — and last fall, scored her own hour-long Prime Video special, Hijabs Off. Johnson's set balances the intersections of her identity as a black woman, her large family, navigating the dating minefield, and her faith — while also poking fun at Hollywood's lame attempts to promote diversity and inclusion. “I got three strong,” Johnson tells the special. “I'm black, I'm a woman, and I'm Muslim. That's the trifecta of diversity.”

Johnson opens the show by asking the audience if “are there any Muslims in the house?” followed by the greeting “Al Salam 'alaikum.“The crowd roars back”Wa 'alaykumu s-salam.”

Then he jokes to the point, “We've never seen that before in a comedy special.” It's a moment that reveals the rarity of Muslim voices in the comedy world. Johnson's raw honesty on stage is combined with impeccable comedic timing, making her audience howl with laughter and question their own culture.

“I'm out on the street in a pair of ripped jeans. I'm good for a hole in the knee,” Johnson jokes as she describes why the “haram police” often hunt her down for her funny choices. On the day we speak in Manhattan, Johnson is wearing baggy jeans, a sheer lemon tank top and pointed heels. “The guys, they have to go out there and march for us,” he continues. “They should be saying 'Let the ladies show their knees. We don't care about the non-knee.' Think about it. Have you ever heard a guy say, “Hey, the one with the knee?!” Ugh!,” he says with a growl that sends the crowd into fits of laughter. “Have you ever heard of that? Like, 'It was the knee for me!'”

Johnson's parents were both raised Christians and converted to Islam later in life. Her father joined the Nation of Islam while in the Navy during the Civil Rights era, when many blacks were searching for a new spiritual identity to combat the racism they experienced in America. Her mother was converted in college after never relating to the stories of the Bible.

Johnson remembers religion being a bright spot in her family's life. But he also faced discrimination and bullying. As a child who wore a chimera, a headscarf that covered her head, neck and shoulders, she was constantly asked questions about her hair, ranging from its texture to its very existence. When she was in the second and third grades, she recalls, the chimera was removed from her head.

Then there were the twin struggles of not seeing positive representations of herself in popular media and seeing her friends get all the dating attention. It wasn't until she wore her older sister's Junior ROTC uniform and wore her hair down outside of school that Johnson realized how differently she was perceived.

“It was like the movies, when the girl takes off her glasses and goes down the stairs. Everyone was saying, “You're so beautiful, you have so much hair.” Once I got it, I didn't want to go back. It was peer pressure,” Johnson says.

Eventually she stopped wearing her hijab for good to play basketball. She says, “I would have stopped wearing it earlier because I didn't like it. No one made me feel good about it. I was Black and I wore a hijab, and I was bullied.… It was the first time I had a viable excuse to convince my father. I'm not proud of it, but that's the truth.”

Johnson's relationship with her family is often at the center of her comedies. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, told a story of growing up in a large family — in her signature dry and skeptical delivery.

“I'm one of 13. My mom wanted 20. She got to 13. When I was in second grade, she had kid number 10. And I said, 'This has got to stop,'” Johnson begins, breaking into a big smile. “I asked my mom to get her tubes tied when I was in second grade. I have no idea how I learned about tube tying. Maybe I was so tired that I sat down in front of a stack of encyclopedias and said, 'There has to be an answer!'”

While her mom was raising Johnson and her siblings, she was also studying theater at Queens College. She had her children act out a scene from Lorraine Hansberry's A raisin in the sun for one of her class assignments.

“I remember it because I knew we weren't supposed to be there,” Johnson tells me with a laugh. “We memorized it [traveling] from Harlem to Queens College. That was the time we needed to work on what he gave us.”

Johnson, who played Beniatha – Walter Younger's independent and college-focused sister – learned she was a natural. After their performance and the passing grade, Johnson's mother told her, “My teacher said it was because of you. [They said] that your daughter.” And still, Johnson hadn't caught the performing arts bug. “I didn't take it as, 'Let me pack up and go to L.A.,'” she says, recalling joking to her mother, ” Why did you make us go to yours school?!'”

Rather than fully commit to theater, Johnson dove headlong into athletics, dabbling in track before settling in as a small forward/point guard in basketball. As a freshman at Harlem's Manhattan Center High School, he helped the varsity team all the way to Madison Square Garden for the state championship.

Until her final years, Johnson had plans to play basketball at Spelman College in Atlanta and maybe go to the WNBA one day. “I had ambitions to become a professional, even if it meant going abroad,” he recalls. “But I got hit by a truck and that changed everything.”

“She changed physically,” she says, and is now legally disabled. “It took a long time to heal” from the hit, Johnson says. “Once I got over that, it was like, 'Well, my God, what did I do to deserve this?' And then he moved into a place of gratitude. There was another girl who was hit, and I remember thinking that my situation was so bad, and then seeing her changed my worldview.”

After Johnson recovered, she took another stab at basketball, playing for the City College of New York, which resulted in a torn ACL. So she dabbled in academics, pursuing degrees in education and mathematics to become a high school math teacher. But he didn't stay on that path for long.

“I met a girl who was an artist and was into music, and we became best friends,” Johnson says. “He said, 'When I graduate, I'm moving to Los Angeles,' and I said, 'Okay, I guess that's the plan?'

When her father died in 2005, things came to a head for Johnson.

“It was a good motivator for me because I realized I didn't want to have any regrets,” Johnson tells me. “My father's death was sudden, health-related but sudden. I spent a lot of time with my mom and my siblings and it made me realize that time is of the essence and tomorrow is not promised. I knew life was out there for me to find, and I knew I had greater aspirations, but I didn't know what they were. Then, a few years later, the comedy was revealed.”

Once in Los Angeles, she Googled “open mics near me” and wrote five-minute sets about not eating pork, her “criminal brother” and her parents who have 13 kids. The crowd responded well and she found her new purpose. As he moved on to bigger sets, the highest-ups in the entertainment world took notice.

Her profile rose significantly after qualifying as a semi-finalist Last Comic Standing in 2014. Since then it has appeared on HBO A Black Lady Sketch, of Hulu Ramy, and has more projects on the horizon. When she looks back on her path here, it all makes sense — every twist and turn. Like it was always meant to be.

“I'm looking forward to telling my own story and meeting new fans along the way,” he says. “Hijabs Off it opened me up to a bigger audience, but the sky's not the limit. We go beyond the sky. I can't plan what God has for me. I'm just going to walk knowing that I'm going through doors, and whatever goes through those doors, that's God.”