Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Best newcomer nominee Rapha Manajem has relaxed low-key style and an unusual backstory, informing a show that touches on interesting issues, but is too verbose, too  light on laughs and with a few needless detours.

It very much feels like an example of a comedian with ten minutes of material padding an hour, with redundant story that’s rarely interesting enough to be worth mentioning.

A former Raw comedy finalist, Manajem is Jewish with German, Israeli, Arab and Yemenite roots. He took time away from comedy after  the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023, and was coaxed back to the stage by a Muslim comic.

No wonder family looms large in his stand-up, starting with the very familiar devices of considering how little he has achieved in his mid-20s compared to his grandfather, who needed no motivational Ritual to get on with life. Meanwhile, his grandmother’s love language was cooking, with food providing a recurring theme for the hour.

Manajem has a few routines on well-worn topics, from encountering naked guys at the gym to how his parents don’t understand emojis – the modern equivalent of comedians mimicking their parents’ ethnic accents, which audiences are understandably nervous about these days.

With identity so central to the show, Manajem speaks of a friend with one set of grandparents who died in the Holocaust, another who were actual Nazis. The easy-going comic is not the sort of act to want to make bad-taste jokes about these difficult topics, so it falls into the ‘more interesting than funny’ category.

His naivety on a trip they took Egypt is a central story, though it’s  long-winded and often flat, with him never quite drawinf us into the story enough. When he talks about Hitler’s Mein Kampf being prominently on sale there, it’s not obvious whether it’s real or just a gag.  

That’s not the only time there’s a gap in getting the audience on board, even on frivolous subjects. His insistence that there’s a huge stigma attached to ordering tap water in restaurants, for example, doesn’t seem convincing, yet he hangs a whole routine on it.

Back to the Egypt trip, and he speaks about him constantly being hassled in the street to buy stuff. Is this really the most interesting thing to happen on the trip? No, as it happens, it just delays us getting to the real story with real jeopardy, which slightly fizzled out.

Speaking of long routes to the the payoff, one gag requires the full retelling of the story of the Israelites being lost in the desert for 40 years.   The relatively weak gag at the end is that it is so long-winded, but it does feel like we’re lost in a punchline desert of our own until we get there.

He ends with a message about identity, tied to the food theme, though reading it from a folder ruins any illusion of spontaneity.

Manajem’s a warm and likeable comic who can boast some decent lines, especially a lovely phrase to describe an old woman’s twisted gait. But The Salmon Was Good feels like a show launched way too soon in his development as as a comic to really land.

Review date: 20 Apr 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival