Comedy
by Sami Shah
Soba Stadium at the Noodle Palace
29th January
by Alex Tate
Maybe I walked in to the Soba Stadium with higher hopes than I should’ve. Sami Shah, a Pakistani comedian profiled in the New York Times and Australian Story, with past performances at TEDx Melbourne and BBC’s Asian Network, was something to look forward to. Presenting a new hour of comedy following a sold-out 2014 run at Fringe World and the Perth Comedy Festival, Separation Anxiety quickly became performance anxiety as many jokes failed to hit their mark.
It’s not true that he was completely unfunny – Shah has a unique perspective on issues ranging from immigration and asylum seekers to serial killers and the ‘joys’ of parenting. But after backing out of a three minute monologue on ISIS and the Sydney siege, before leading in to an atheistic justification of why “Muslims should apologise for being Muslim, Christians should apologise for being Christian and Jews should apologise for being Jews” because the audience went decidedly quiet – well, it’s probably worth reconsidering if you should try to justify that at all.
It’s not that we’re uptight here in Perth. We like to think we’re progressive, and we certainly don’t have a problem with ‘edgy’ humour. But if you want us to laugh, it has to actually be funny. A death threat received from grammatically-correct white supremacists sounds hilarious on paper – but when you actually print the paper, and read it off on stage, a snappy one-liner becomes a 3-minute show-and-tell that quickly becomes tiring.
In fact, two audience members fell asleep – that was a highlight. To Shah’s credit he handled it superbly, admitting it was arguably a better response than being booed off stage by 150 drunken university students at an end of semester bash.
With no real cohesion between stories and jokes, often stumbling from one line to another before stopping himself to backtrack or try to remember what he was talking about in the first place, Shah delivers an unmemorable, unremarkable and at times cringe-laden series of lectures in a disguised Central Tafe lecture theatre at Fringe World’s Noodle Palace.
The sound tech throws a thumbs-up after the classic ‘how are we doing for time?’ and the audience hears Shah’s lengthy stream-of-consciousness opinion on the Abbott government before wrapping up. The audience claps and he takes a bow, before sharing one final story of how he’d just written a book. It’s usually $30 but he’s brought a few along and he’s happy to sign them at the back and give them away for $30. Now that was funny – but for all the wrong reasons.
Sami Shah: Separation Anxiety runs until the 12th of February at multiple venues. Check it out in the Fringe Guide here.
