After a three-week break, this column is back with another review and this time it involves the Petersham Comedy Festival which I attended last Saturday.
It has been over two years since I attended a comedy show and while I know the business of making people laugh is a tough one, I definitely thought that this comic show was a letdown.
The show had one distinctively Muslim comic, a lady who got on stage and started dropping the F-bomb.
She pre-warned the crowd that she was known to use a lot of explicit language in her shows and that it wasn’t befitting of her Islamic image.
Well, as a Muslim from Malaysia, I feel that if you are going to don the hijab which is a sacred headgear for the religion, and if you want to be a comedian, you can, but make sure the jokes are halal compliant too otherwise you are no different than this Malaysian wannabe comic ‘star.’
There were also two more comedians with Muslim-sounding names one of them was from Lebanon while the other comic was half Arabic and half Italian named Jamal.
Jamal was okay but when he started making jokes about Jesus, I thought that was a bit inappropriate because I think race and religion should not be made into jokes as it could trigger lots of people the wrong way.
But he was lucky that night as the crowd was rather understanding and shockingly they kept cheering him on.
The final act was from a comic who was originally from Lebanon and joked about his divorce and how he had sex for the first time after a long hiatus.
But before dishing out the jokes he noticed that the audience had consisted of a group of teenagers and asked them point blank, why are you guys here which made the crowd laugh.
But the comic still went ahead and told his lewd jokes because I think he didn’t have any other material to substitute it with.
He also took out his phone halfway through the event to check on time.
Even he was getting impatient to get off the stage.
It was a lame night, but the teenagers enjoyed themselves, as I heard them singing praises in the bathroom right after the event was over.
I am not going to name the names of the comics here because I think most of them self-censored a lot that night because some of the jokes were too lewd to be shared with the crowd especially since there were some teens in sight.
Having said that, I would strongly advise future comedy events to have some sort of age restrictions slapped on them in the future.
This means anyone under 18 is barred from entering such shows.
This is my two cents, of course.
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