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A GREAT READ!
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/24NITV.html?pagewanted=all

It was during Meybodi’s show in September 2000 that this story really begins. As always, calls were coming in from across the United States and Western Europe. And then a call came that didn’t sound like the others; it clicked weirdly, like an Iranian phone line. The caller said he was in Isfahan, a city in central Iran, and that he was picking up NITV’s satellite signal. Meybodi didn’t believe him.

‘’Who am I?’’ Meybodi asked.

‘’I don’t know,’’ said the caller. ‘’But I see you on my TV.’’

Meybodi still didn’t believe him; nobody did. He asked for the caller’s phone number and said he would call him back. Still on the air, Meybodi phoned Isfahan, and sure enough the caller picked up. But Meybodi still didn’t believe his story....
Meybodi asked his viewers in Iran to phone, fax or e-mail NITV their protests of the regime’s routine American flag burning. The next week, 87,000 people inside Iran responded. Just after Sept. 11, Atabay asked Iranian youth to show their solidarity with the United States by carrying a candle into the streets. Thousands in Tehran complied, and hundreds were thrown in prison. Some are still there...
Then he takes phone calls. A 12-year-old girl calls from Tehran to say that her schoolteacher accused her of pro-American sentiments and threatened to take five points off her grade if she didn’t trample an American flag.

‘’What did you say?’’ Pahlavi asks.

‘’I said, ‘To hell with you,’’’ the girl says. ‘’I’m not going to do it.’’’...

For 20 years or so, Dean performed this act before tiny clusters of Iranians in the United States. He would study video footage of Iranian clerics by day and mimic them by night. Once a month, someone called him from Iran and threatened to kill him. As often as not, he arrived at the small theaters he played only to discover that a bomb threat had just been called in and that the show had been canceled. ‘’Most of my shows, nobody shows up because they think the ayatollahs are going to bomb me,’’ he says. ‘’I am the only one who makes fun of these mullahs. Big time.’’ He pauses. ‘’The mullahs, they like you to be sad. They like you to cry. It’s when you laugh that they put you in jail.’...

‘’If mullahs can have a couple of wives each,’’ she asks, ‘’why can’t I take a couple of husbands?’’

‘’Eeeee!’’ Mullah Hajji shrieks in outrage. With one hand, he hectors the woman about male dignity; with the other he picks his nose.