Melbourne comedy festival review by Steve Bennett

Sami Shah is an important emerging voice in comedy, and with a fascinating personal story to tell. 

He was a journalist in Karachi but decided to migrate to Australia after witnessing the suicide bomb which killed more than 150 people in an attempt on the life of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

He got residency, but under the terms of his visa, was forced to spend the first two years in a rural area – the small, and very conservative town of Northam in Western Australia. That explains why it’s taken so long for him to make his festival debut at Melbourne, where he has now, finally, been allowed to settle.

I, Migrant, the same title as his well-received 2015 book about his experiences, charts Shah’s origin story as both a comedian and an Australian. It is a fascinating hour, although as a comedy, the show can be burdened with the weight of explanation, not to mention a presentation that’s often in no rush to get to the punchline. Perhaps the slow pace of life in Northam has rubbed off on Shah.

Nonetheless, the stories are often gripping and always eloquently told: from him being held up at gunpoint in the crime-plagued streets of Karachi, where he broke the tension with a joke and decided comedy could connect people, to working for the technology-shunning Christian Brethren in WA, answering their emails, so they didn’t have to.

Against an often aggressively charged anti-immigration, anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia, Shah has a first-hand insight as well as well-tuned political and social antenna. For the record, he’s an atheist brought up in an Islamic family, but it’s not a distinction your average racist would appreciate.

Shah would be justified in ranting against the bigots of groups like Reclaim Australia, but he’s more considered and talks about subjects such as non-white racism, as well as his delight at being driven around by a white man after ordering an Uber.

I, Migrant probably shows off Shah’s skills as a personable speaker more than it does as a comedian, and he’s happy to let stories unfold because they are interesting more than the are funny. But he does speckle the hour with astute and funny lines about, for example, the worthlessness of a Pakistani passport, that are delivered with skillful timing. 

We will be hearing more from Shah. In this political climate, we have to.

Review date: 10 Apr 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett