 The Lord will always lift you up in His strength when others tear you down. In Iran to an Iranian father and American mother, Moody Malavi found at an early age how to read the comedic moments in any situation. His family moved to the United States in 1981 where Moody used his funny personality to escape multitudes of adverse moments in his young life, bullying. Today he's an award-winning comedian and is a tsunami on stage. His high energy and animated storytelling mannerisms are unforgettable and his light shines bright for Jesus in a dark world. This is his story. This is today's Nashville. This is faith. Moody, you have been everywhere making people laugh. I just want to thank you so much for inviting me into your home and getting a chance to listen to your story. Thank you for coming. It was a surprise that anybody wanted to come in here and talk. You know, you have quite the past. You were born in Iran and how in the world did you get to Nashville? Let's go back to your childhood and how you got here. My mom is from Chattanooga, Tennessee and she met my father in the 60s. He was an orthopedic surgeon. She was a nurse and they hit it off and decided to go back to his place, you know, a quick 10,000-mile trip east. And that's where we were born. My brothers and I were born there. The Iranian Revolution broke out and we were probably the last of those people to leave the country. And what people don't realize is we got here in 1981. We left there in 1979. So there's a gap and that gap was filled with a route through Turkey and to Greece and we stayed there for a while. And then we went to Spain and we went to a school that was 90 miles from this fishing village that we were living in. I got super sick. My oldest brother got super sick. Mom was a nurse. She nursed us back to health and she's like, I can't do this anymore. The Iran-Iraq war had broken out by then. So she's like, I'm going to take my kids to Chattanooga in 1981. So that was a wake-up call for everybody. Because I don't know if you know the 1981 stuff with Iran. Then bringing three Iranian baby boys to the south was a little different. Now how old were you? I was six then. Six. So how has life been since then? It's been interesting. When you're an Iranian in the south, people immediately have that prejudice. People don't want to call it prejudice, but they judge you before they meet you that's pre-judging. And yeah, that's prejudice. And that's what happened. So we came into the country. We didn't know anything about white Americana Southern culture. We failed the entrance exam to the Lutheran school that my mom was trying to get us into. And they said, do you have cable? Because lots of foreign children have this problem. And so mom did what every mom would do and she bought every single channel. And we saw all sorts of things that weren't ever seen in Iran. And that's where I fell in love with comedy. So I figured if I could make people laugh, they would stop getting on to me that I was Iranian. So you mentioned you were teased? Yes. So we were, my brothers and I, we all had the same problem where people would look at us differently. And they would, again, pre-judge us. And we would have the problems where we couldn't gain friendships very quickly. And we would have to, it was just a struggle because people didn't know what to do with us. So I started joking. I started making people laugh and that was the... How old were you when that? Oh, I was six. Yeah, because I mean I saw Eddie Murphy do it and I thought it was awesome because we had cable. So we saw all sorts of stuff. Now you lived in Chattanooga for most of your schooling? Yeah, we moved out of Chattanooga to the National Area in 2019. Okay. So we pretty much were Chattanoogans. So I went online and started looking at some of your videos. They're hilarious. Thank you. Let's talk about LSD. Oh, LSD. That's the least stressful decision. So that's how my wife, Kelly, and I live. We find whatever is the least stressful thing to do for our future selves. So we look at our past selves. Our past selves can teach us so much about the mistakes that we've made. And so we can take our current self to be less selfish in life. And instead of doing what's going to help the selfish current self do what they want to do, it's like, what can I do to serve my future self so my future self can be poised to serve anybody that God puts in our path? So that's where Take the LSD comes from. It's just a fun way to remember it. A lot of people don't understand that. They think it's the path of least resistance and it's not. The best way to think of it is when you get on an airplane and they talk about if the oxygen mask comes down, put it on yourself first, then serve the person next to you. It's the same concept. So tell me about your wife and your family. She's my best buddy. We've been married 25 years this year. So she's my high school sweetheart. And we joke about this little thing where my mom got remarried. We got married in 1998, so you don't have to do the math. But my mom got remarried in 2002 to my father-in-law, which technically makes Kelly and I, step-brother and step-sister, on paper to a child drawing his family tree. It looks like a wreath. So we always had to explain that to the teachers. Like he's failing. You don't understand. It's the truth. So we've been married 25 years and siblings for 21. So tell me a funny story about your marriage. Oh, well, probably the funniest thing is that my wife can't hear. She's had progressive hearing loss since 2006. And that gets us in a lot of trouble. So we started learning sign language and we're horrible at it because it doesn't make any sense to do sign language unless everybody else does sign language with you. But we learned the words like fine, which is this. But I don't know if the word fine means the same thing, but in our house, fine is a bad word. And so typically if I ask, are you okay? Like, should I go like that? So if there's flair, then she's not fine at all. And of course your pride gets involved. And that's really the secret between us is the reason people will say stuff like you don't know how lucky you are. You all have a great marriage. It's because we put our pride and we put it away. And so if we have a problem, we know that we can speak truth and say I have an issue. Here's the narrative. And that tells the other one. Okay, I'm going to listen. And I'm going to ingest what I hear and not going to get prideful. I'm not going to get defensive. And that has been the LSD. So that's how we check the LSD. So from your marriage, you have a couple kids? We do. Or nephews. How do you want to look at that? Nephews. We have two boys, 21 and 15, Mason and Dylan. Moody, tell me something funny about your kids. They're memynians. I can get them to do anything. So I could go to some place and if I think of a fun idea, I could get them to go do it. And they just trust me enough to make it happen. Our neighbor, I messaged Kelly and said I had the worst dream. I was on a cruise ship with your youngest son and he went over the side and I could have saved him but I did and I watched him fall over the edge. And I looked over at Dylan and he was probably 10 at the time. I said I repeated what happened and they go, it's kind of weird. I said, hey go to the door and just tell her, why did you let me go? And they just walk away. And so he did. It was the best. So I like to mess with people and I use these little kids to make it happen. Well you know, I love how you use comedy in certain situations and you really talked about you know, you being bullying and even as an adult and we're going to talk about that when we come back. Moody, you talked about how you use comedy to deal with your bullying and also as an adult. But how did your faith come into play along with your comedy and to get over some of these issues? To talk about the faith, we had to talk about where that came from. I was 15. I was, I had a lot of peer pressure and I needed people to like me. And so that's where the comedy started at all, you know. But as I grew older, I was trying to get more friendships and I was extremely, I was failing everywhere. I took the family car, which was parked at the house that was for sale, that we were house sitting. I took it so and I crashed it and I took it into a ditch and it rolled over and it became half the size that it was and I was stuck in that car for three and a half hours and they had to cut me out. So my mom was called immediately afterwards and said, your son has been in a wreck, meet us at the hospital. She goes, no, he's downstairs. I'm like, no, we're looking at him, he's in a wreck. So she she got to the hospital about eight minutes from a 30-minute ride and which is where I learned to drive is watching her. So that's probably why didn't do her well. But once they got me out of the car I had my right leg was shattered. My knee was where my hip was. My left foot was broken backwards around the steering wheel. My head had hit the windshield five times and it looked like the the movie The Predator where the jaw was out like that and my torso was all cut up and there was a guy named Scoby from Lifeforce which is the the helicopter service in Chattanooga had climbed into the wreckage to be with me those three and a half hours and he was telling me yo mama jokes to keep me from passing out and every time I went he would say don't laugh because you look like you get three mouths and it's quite disgusting so just don't make that happen. So we finally get out and they're like we got a bed for them at Children's. I'm like this kid will not fit anything at Children's taking to Erlinger and I get there and I don't know if you've ever tried to talk without a bottom jaw but you can't you know it's just it's very difficult to make any any any words. We get to the hospital the doctor's like your mom's here she's been waiting for you three and a half hours because she's like where's my kid where's my kid and they're like oh they're still cutting him out of the car so I'm sitting there like you can't any heck because I'm gonna mimic what it was like so you can't let her in here she's gonna kill me and she's like no we it'll be fine she wants to see us and you don't understand let's let's say downstairs because I knew I snuck out and she will know I snuck out if I'm here with you and uh so he finally said listen if she tries to kill you I'll bring you back to life and I'm like okay and so that's you know that's where it all starts because I kept thinking why did I live through that because it shouldn't have I should have I should have died you're at 15 I was 15 no license you sound like the cop yeah no no license at all it was a given and uh I I you know struggled with understanding what to do for the next several years of my life and when I was 21 my neighbor from across the street shared the gospel with me and while I'd gone to Lutheran school nothing ever really clicked because I was just trying to avoid getting teased or you know bullied in school so I really never got into the gospel so when I was 21 I accepted Jesus as my savior and I learned more about it and I baptized when I was 23 and that's when my father found out and he was Muslim and he expected me to be Muslim because he was Muslim and no one ever taught me about faith they just expected I would learn it through osmosis my mom was Methodist and you know dad wasn't when they found out that I got baptized he was very upset like just because this happened doesn't mean you're not Muslim you're born Muslim you're then you you're die Muslim and so we had that that that was a big problem between us and eventually our relationship separated because I had to choose following Jesus or following my dad and that was a pretty big breakup for us and our relationship just died because of it so but that is where to understand why I chose that is because I've felt that I'm alive for some reason I didn't know what at the time but I think it's to bring laughter to people did you ever repair that relationship with your dad no I didn't unfortunately no he passed away in 2006 how do you deal with that it's difficult I can see now as as you know I'm I'm now the age that my father was when I was born I can I can see where he had very prideful thoughts my mom had very prideful thoughts and because they didn't work it out that's why we were separated as a family he stayed in Iran and she's like I'm going to take my kids away from the revolution but dad would had a really good standing in Iran when we would travel back and forth I remember where he wanted to be in the line with the people you know in the in the guards like you're Doctor Monevi you come with us you don't have to stay in the four hour line of customs no no no I want to be with the people it's like well we're taking your bag so you can go with your bags or you can stand the line so we really never had much to worry about because we were with him you know he was this top or the big surgeon everybody in Tehran loved him he so he didn't come to the state when you no no so so not growing up with the dad was a big problem you know it's what led to a lot of the the co-dependence peer you know issues that that I wanted friendship all the time but the the path to faith was learning that all I really needed was was Jesus in my life and and and serving the people that he puts in my path and I learned that every day a little bit more and I find to yoke with people that are positive and not negative you know I can love the negative people from afar but the ones that I need closest to me is the ones that can build me up because it's it's tough you know especially when you're doing stuff entertaining people you'll hear the negative comments more than you will the positive and you have to be aligned with the positive people because I don't believe God ever speaks in negative thoughts I believe that is where the devil comes in and he has to shout and God never does he just whispers and so if I can tune out the negative thoughts I can listen to God's whisper to know where what I'm supposed to be doing next. Do you feel like as an adult though that you still have those bullying issues with people? Easily yeah and for different reasons traveling around doing comedy in different venues if I'm not a specific person you know or meet a specific demographic immediately you're judged and that's really people go to the comedy club some people go to judge and heckle and they want to really be part of the show even though they paid for someone else to see it but the yeah you run into that a lot and it's not just about being Iranian it's about you know being fat you know I'm bigger than anybody that I know and that's a big thing it's one of the the two disabilities that people don't understand is hearing loss they get mad at you about that like my wife she can't hear and people get upset and they have to keep repeating and when you don't fit in someone's car you know like when the enterprise tried to pick me up in their little Kia they're like no and they just kept driving away so it's there's there's a lot of prejudices I didn't have to all be because I'm Iranian most people don't know I'm Iranian until they see my name and then you know it's over Moody in the midst of all the issues that you've dealt with the bullying God has a tremendous plan for you and we're going to talk about it in a minute Moody tell me where God's leading you now that is a really interesting thing so our company is called Moodyvation because it's just a fun way of saying motivation and I typically talk about three major pieces when I get to do like a corporate show or a church show one of them is take the LSD which we talked about let's throughout all of our life is is what can I do to serve my future self so that he can be well poised to serve people God puts in his path the other one is MSU where people make stuff up and challenge that so so when someone says but we've always done it this way that's one of those things like okay but why do we do this way I love to learn about the why I'm that annoying kid that'll ask why five or six times to get to the root cause so the third thing is human I thank you if you look at the word humanity it's it's the word human and then I and TY I was texting it one day and I saw it I was like oh look at that humanity human ITY human I thank you this is a concept that people I want them to learn I want them to understand that everybody has value and no one should be compared to anybody else everybody is incomparable and so how do we do that so we make sure that every interaction that we have with people we say okay I need to make sure this person feels valuable so I may ask them something along the lines of do you remember when you first decided to do this job when there was offered to you and I want you to think about that time I want you to think about the elation that was around it where you got to say yes and I want you to tell me about that if you're comfortable through that tell me about that piece you might if we do that real quick with you like when you decided to do this this job of this show can you you don't have to go into detail about it just do you remember that day when you decide to say yes this is what I'm going to do do I remember that exact day that that moment when you decided this is it this is what I want to go do yeah I think so okay so I want you to hold on to that and I want you to think about it and I want to say thank you for saying yes because how do you didn't say yes to that you and I would have never met we would have never had this opportunity to learn more about each other to see how God wants us to work together so that's the basis of human I thank you all those three things go to make motivation and what we want to do Kelly and I really have it on our heart to serve the unplanned pregnancies and this is people can make it political but at the end of the day it's humans so how do we make the humans feel valuable one thing I've never seen people do is foster the mother with the child so how do we do that so that's where we want to create this company is a nonprofit called we got you nothing new we just want to bring different agencies and people and volunteers and everything together to be the central hub where we can say there's a person that has a problem and she needs support she needs to feel that someone's got her so we got you and if it's a all the socioeconomic stuff you know all the shunning or I'm not going to be able to continue education I'm not going to continue my career all those reasons why people have so much stress about an unplanned birth so what can we do what can how can we help that person how can we help and come alongside them and support them in the foster system today there's just so much that's not right with it one of the things that I feel would be helpful as if that child had an opportunity to be raised with his mom and give her every bit of support possible and if it means for Kelly and I to take on another niece you know into our life and say hey this is we're going to make sure that you get the support that you need whatever that entails and we will go reach out to work from home agencies to schooling from home today in 2023 the the options are limitless so let's let's tap into that and I've been in the technology industry for 25 years I've got a lot of count tax and I think we can make it happen so it's just a matter of getting people that want to serve but they don't know how to to people that need service and they don't know where to get it so this is starting now well right now it's a concept and it came up this past summer or last summer and we don't know how we're going to make it happen but what's really interesting is every show that comes to me that says hey can you come and do a show for us they all have a little piece of this pie like oh we could use this organization to fill this need we can use this one to fill this need and so it's really interesting so this is totally led by god in our opinion because everybody that we're meeting fits into the same ultimate service to another human I love that you've got your comedy this ministry and you said IT yeah yeah that's that's that's the bread and butter so you'll hear people say if you get to if you get paid doing what you love then that's awesome so moody what would you say to somebody that's listening today about their value and what god is wants them to hear so I have a lot of struggles I struggle with weight I struggle with not feeling worth to people and I struggle with just not being understood and through all that god gave me humor and so I can go out and I can make people laugh you know we had a show in mcminville Tennessee this past winter big banquet hall 300 people and they had these little chairs that I don't know who created them but it wasn't for anybody of any size everybody was sitting on the edge afraid they were going to fall apart you've seen them at weddings they're they're basically toothpicks and plastic put together and so I'm sitting there and I'm come testing it out like I'm making a joke I'm like you know you guys are really scared about all this I'm the biggest guy here I have some faith these things are working and at that moment I was wrong then the seat just collapsed and I splattered and that's what we learned I didn't bounce so some person from two tables away jumps up to come help and now you're embarrassed you've just splattered you're supposed to go speak in front of these people make them laugh and now everybody's like oh my goodness what's going on like how he must feel terrible and they just witness this embarrassing moment and he's come up to help me and I don't like when people ask me if I'm okay when obviously I'm not so I don't ever ask that question I don't know why people do that but I jumped up really quickly and which I didn't expect but my mind I was thinking I have a new Apple watch and it tattletales on me it tells the emergency crews that hey he's down and then they all come running I don't know if you know that about the iOS system now but it's quite embarrassing if you fall a lot but so here this guy's helping me I jump up and I grabbed the chair that was next to me that wasn't broken and I and I made it look at the other one like don't you do what he did or all you'll get some of the same you know so I was trying to make this fun because I was extremely embarrassed and I sit back down this time on the edge of the new seat and the lady was at her table she's a nurse and I was like by the way you're a nurse are you not she said I am so why didn't you come help she goes but you got up so fast I was like oh wasn't that fast I said well where do you even know she said hospice I said oh well so that's not in your wheelhouse like they never get back up she was no I don't so I use I don't know I find the humor in things to offset all the all the steps to your question what would I tell people is is all that other stuff doesn't matter you know if whatever you're calling has mine I feel is humor that and also helping little people come closer to God because if they come on a plane people that don't pray well always pray like please don't let them sit next to me and and I feel that's another calling I have for them don't worry about all the stuff that's outside you know you've got you've got something on your heart you've got a message of God has that he wants you to share just share it and see where it goes moody thank you so much what a pleasure it is to sit down with you keep making people laugh thank you my friend are you comparing yourself to others Jesus wants you to know that you are worthy you are enough and you are loved this is today's Nashville this is faith