White people can’t coup for shit. Unlike Trumps hapless clingers-on raiding the Capitol, it involves a little more than being draped in a flag while live streaming your stupidity to social media. That sick burn is the outrageous highlight of a raucous hour in the company of Pakistan-born former ABC radio host and stand-up comedian, Sami Shah. Cuck is a side-splitting take down of racism, white privilege and cultural appropriation, with the latter illustrated by the Proud Boys muscling in on terrorism.
Shah’s spearing of his chosen home (musing he might have been better off down in NZ) is delivered with an adorably amiable style that positively invites self-reflection, without soap boxing. He jokes that radio fans will be surprised by the level of swearing and sex talk, and muses on whether the sacked staffer at parliament was just really into desks. Rattling through the various false narratives of lockdown, including the ridiculousness of the ‘Dictator Dan’ moniker – “I’ve lived under two dictators, and they do not let you call them one” – it’s a rapid-fire lollapalooza that deserves a much bigger crowd than the downstairs room at Comedy Republic allows.
Hitting where it hurts with such good humour, you can’t help but cackle at white people’s manifest shitdom. As he sees it, Aussies really don’t celebrate non-toxic running water, electricity that stays on, and non-microwaveable strawberries anywhere near as much as these treasures deserve.
It’s not just the [predominantly] white audience that get it in the neck. Shah's more than happy to spill on the failure of his second marriage three months in, and his subsequent lockdown depression. His wife decided she was leaving him in favour of living a life of polyamory. He counters that he didn’t leave a Muslim country only for the hipsters of Melbourne to take up the task of bearded men having five wives. If the coup chat scores the loudest laughs, an aside about his brief stint at ABC Breakfast co-hosting with Jacinta Parsons post-Red Symons is also genius. As Shah notes, we now have a metric for white privilege. “It takes one brown man and one white woman to add up to one white man.”
Put us down for Shah (and Parson’s) company any time.
