Akmal Saleh brings decades of chaos-fuelled comedy to Murwillumbah

FOR comedian Akmal Saleh, the best material rarely comes from life’s successes.

After more than three decades on stage, he believes good comedy often arises from mishaps, misunderstandings and accidents.

“If things go well, there’s no laughs there,” he said.

“It’s only laughs when reality is sort of disturbed or fractured or something’s gone wrong.

“And the comedian’s job, I guess, is to explore that to their advantage, to make it funny.”

It’s a philosophy that underpins My Family and Other Criminals, which Saleh will bring to Murwillumbah on 4 July.

The show draws on memories that have resurfaced with age and become fertile ground for comedy.

Though neither tale is expected to feature in the show, Saleh described the time an uncle used his family’s garden hose as a makeshift enema and another relative who posed as a doctor for years despite never attending medical school, as examples of the colourful characters in his orbit.

“There’s a lot of weird sh*t that happened growing up that far back and I’ve got a lot of family that have gifted me with stories,” he said.

For Saleh, growing up in the Western Sydney suburb of Punchbowl offered its own unique backdrop.

“I was a really quiet kid in Punchbowl because it was quite a violent area,” he said. “And I’m not violent.

“But I expressed my anger at the world by going out and, for some reason just at night, and stepping on people’s exhaust pipes till they’d break,” he said.

He attributed the behaviour to pent-up teenage frustration.

“I was probably 14 and you know, 14-year-olds, they’ve got a lot of anger, and I didn’t express the anger that much,” Saleh said.

Growing up before the age of video games and social media, he joked that his delinquent antics became a form of entertainment.

“We didn’t have PlayStation or Xbox or any of that… so that was my little toy,” Saleh said.

The son of Egyptian migrants, Saleh also reflected on how dramatically Australia’s comedy landscape has changed since he first stepped on stage.

“When I started doing stand-up, there were no brown people doing it at all in the whole of Australia,” he said.

“Now there’s millions. There are so many black and brown and Asians and all sorts,” he said.

“It’s really exploded, which is good,” he said.

For Saleh, comedy reflects the diverse range of voices in modern Australia.

“It’s a reflection on society,” he said.

“So you get all sorts of people saying all sorts of different things, having different senses of humour.”

He joked that without those diverse voices, the industry would be painfully bland.

“If Pauline Hanson had her way, all the comedians would be white, talking about airplane food or whatever,” he said.

“It would just be so bland.”

Saleh will perform My Family and Other Criminals at The Regent Theatre in Murwillumbah on 4 July from 8pm. Tickets are available through Trybooking.