The five comics in Stand Up, however, do have something in common: They’ve all struggled with stereotyping and pigeonholing because of the way they look or the religious beliefs they hold. Usman jokes about the fear he senses in fellow plane passengers; Egyptian-born Ahmed Ahmed, who recently appeared in Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show doc, gets plenty of auditions but mostly for background terrorists in movies and video games; Obeidallah, who’s part Palestinian and part Italian, claims people have a hard time accepting his comedy, since they know only the worst about Middle Easterners; Tissa Hami endured a tormented childhood as an Iranian in a mostly white New Jersey town during the hostage crisis; and Maysoon Zayid’s material about being a Palestinian Muslim causes walkouts much more frequently than jokes about having cerebral palsy or being a virgin.

When it comes to educating viewers on the plight of these individual comedians, the doc certainly does its job. But Usman, a scholar of the Koran and a former attorney, believes it reflects a problem rooted in the general misconceptions most Americans have about Muslims. “Muslim has become an invented category, for the purposes of American sociology and politics: Whatever white America thinks is Muslim is Muslim. If they have an Arab-sounding name, they must be Muslim. It’s high time we begin to be honest in America,” he says. “It’s worse given that the doc is on PBS. They have a public responsibility to educate and inform, but in some small ways they’re contributing to preexisting stereotypes. It could have provided a great opportunity to address those.”

Yet Baker doesn’t seem too concerned. “Since the Crossroads series deals with the impact of 9/11, I wanted to look at whose ethnic identity was most affected by those events, and it’s people of Middle-Eastern origin—anyone who’s had trouble going through an airport since 9/11,” he says. Thus he chose not to include African-American Muslims (he lined up a perfect comic candidate, Preacher Moss, but he claims the story didn’t fit the context) and picked the term “Muslim American Comics” as “kind of a shorthand.”

“I could have called them Middle-Eastern American, but it starts to become too many words,” Baker says. “All of the comics are culturally Muslim—Dean grew up in sort of a mixed family, so you could say he was. [Similarly,] I’m not sure if you’d have to say ‘Christian-American comedians’ about people who, if they had to check a box, would say Christian but they don’t necessarily go to church or believe a lot of that stuff. But that’s sort of their heritage.”

Still, Usman doesn’t think the shorthand helps. If PBS reflects the public, then clearly the public isn’t well informed; even something as seemingly innocuous as an imprecise title contributes to wrongful conceptions about Middle Eastern Americans. “After 9/11, everyone wanted to know what ‘these people’ were talking about,” Usman says, “but it’s high time we nuanced that discussion.”

Stand Up goes up Sunday 11, 9pm on PBS.