My mother’s birthday is in December, but she likes to say she was reborn the day we arrived from Iran and passed through the Melbourne custom gates. I used to think it was just a humorous way to hide her age, but later I realised it was a truth wrapped in a joke.
We left Iran in October 1984, five years after the swift and sweeping reforms of the Islamic Revolution had radically transformed the country. Gone was the distinction between state and religion. Critics of the state became critics of Islam and were punished. Those who could flee, did. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, faced tough terms in brutal prisons. Young men were conscripted and sent to the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War; my father was one of them. Some people just disappeared. ‘Public enemies’ dangled by their necks from cranes in town squares.
Sometimes the truth is so big and so heavy that it crushes your spirit. For my family, comedy became a swaddle that blanketed over the horrors of the past. Like the saying goes: If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.
Humour always served us well. My father often plays dumb because it pisses bullies off. Less than a year after his arrival a foreman he was working with told him “Fuck you.” My father grinned happily and simply replied “You’re welcome” despite understanding full well the meaning of the foreman’s words. He’d watched Scarface a million times over.
There’s a photograph in a family album from the day we landed at Tullamarine Airport, my father all in brown with a thick moustache and a thicker monobrow, and my mother sporting oversized aviators and a beige maghnaeh that hides her afro. I’m a wide eyed, curly haired toddler in a knit jumper. It took six years and three attempts to secure our humanitarian visas.
During that time, we lived in a tiny two bedroom house near Abbottsford Convent in Melbourne with my aunt, her husband, her son, and an older cousin. My parents told us every person who came through the door was an “aunty” or an “uncle”. When I was a teenager, I had the awkward task of explaining to my genuinely surprised younger brother that all these people were not related to us by blood and that our grandmother didn’t actually have give birth to hundreds of children.
Later, I discovered that language could be a weapon, one that I would have to learn to fight back with. After being graciously told to ‘Speak English! (This is Australia!’) at the local Franklins one day, I worked extra hard to make sure I had the sharpest wit, the biggest vocabulary, the sassiest comebacks and the tightest wordplay north of the NSW border.
I learned to wield English just as well as any native speaker. I educated myself with Western comedy legends, obsessively recording programs off the TV onto VHS and watching them on repeat. I absorbed the brilliant absurdity of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Amy Sedaris, the cutting snark of Rik Mayall, the loaded humour of Are You Being Served?. These people schooled me on power. They taught me that if one finds the humour in a bad situation, one can diffuse or control its impact.
I recall the many times in my life I was told to “go back to where I can came from.” These days, though I still rage at xenophobia and racism, when I hear things like this again, I laugh at my antagonists. I laugh at their ignorance, and the fact that they’re telling me to repatriate myself when we stand on stolen Indigenous land.
I see the comedic and the tragic as being inextricably linked. My work has always come from a deeply autobiographical place, drawing directly from the frustrations from my day-to-day life. For me, the best humour lies in the space where contradictions meet.
I often talk about my mental health struggles in comedic terms. Not because I don’t take my depression or anxiety seriously. But because I am all too acquainted with the falsehoods my brain will tell me from time to time – most boiling down to the lie that “I’m not good enough.”
I recognise these thoughts for what they are: ludicrous, illogical untruths. And I’ve learnt to laugh at the absurdity of my situation.
Frankly, all this makes me feel better. It also makes other people feel better. When I share stories from my life with people using humour, I’m demonstrating that situations can improve, and that we’re not alone in our struggles. Sometime failure is very funny.
To me comedy is defiance. It is a cream pie in the face of anxiety and fear. If you can make someone crack up laughing, that’s how the light gets in.
Sammaneh ‘Shampoo’ Poursh will be performing at at Brunswick Mechanics Institute on Wed 26 June as part of (19–29 June).
