{"id":566382,"date":"2026-03-26T21:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-26T21:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/566382\/"},"modified":"2026-03-26T21:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T21:14:11","slug":"why-comedian-nazeem-hussain-laughs-about-the-things-that-make-him-want-to-cry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/566382\/","title":{"rendered":"Why comedian Nazeem Hussain laughs about the things that make him want to cry"},"content":{"rendered":"

The packed room at the Brisbane Powerhouse is howling. It’s a Sunday night crowd of couples, groups of friends, families with younger kids in tow, and even the older “aunties” and mums that are sometimes the punchlines of comedian Nazeem Hussain’s jokes.<\/p>\n

He’s slinging gags about everybody: brown people, black people, white people \u2014 and every single one of them, including me, is alternately laughing in horror or sheer delight.<\/p>\n

I’ve spent weeks studying Nazeem’s comedy and days with him for a new episode of Creative Types, but as this risky and outrageous comedy swings all around me, I still can’t figure how he does it.<\/p>\n

“I don’t really have another way,” Nazeem tells me after the show. “If I’m going to make fun of myself, it has to be interactive. So, whoever’s in the crowd, I like to try and get them involved.”<\/p>\n

\"Nazeem<\/p>\n

Nazeem Hussain had the audience in stitches at Brisbane Powerhouse. (Supplied: Justin Ma)<\/p>\n

Nazeem has been trying to make people laugh since he was a teenager at his local Muslim community events: he was the guy dragged up the front to fill in time when the projector broke down.<\/p>\n

Some of his humour directly recalled the racism and bullying he’d experienced as a kid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Especially when you can make a joke about the racist, it’s almost like making a joke about the bully,” he says. “You’ve got a microphone this time.”<\/p>\n

Nazeem is one of our most brilliant, brave and complete comedians, having built a 20-year career out of making difference, discrimination and racism funnier than it ever has the right to be.<\/p>\n

\"Nazeem<\/p>\n

Nazeem Hussain has branched into TV as well as stand-up, appearing in ABC parenting series, The Role of a Lifetime.\u00a0 (Supplied: ABC TV)<\/p>\n

He has put Gaza and the occupied territories at the centre of his comedy from his very early days and he pulls no punches \u2014 in fact it lands often as a political gut-punch. That night in the Brisbane Powerhouse, the audience might have had their hands over their mouths in shock \u2014 but they were helplessly laughing.<\/p>\n

I ask him about this, nonplussed: how can jokes about bombing, about human shields, about death and trauma in the Middle East be \u2026 funny?<\/p>\n

Watch Creative Types with Virginia Trioli on ABC iview<\/a><\/p>\n

For Nazeem, the only logical response to the horror he was feeling as he watched the devastation unfold in Gaza was comedy.<\/p>\n

“It was such a heavy feeling,” he recalls of the last 12 months, “and the only way I know how to process stuff is on stage”.<\/p>\n

“I wasn’t really sure if it was a good or bad thing to do, but what I found pretty quickly was that audiences were feeling as heavy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“And the jokes that I was doing were great ways to connect your head and your heart.”<\/p>\n

“You’re feeling horrible \u2014 but why? So, let’s release some tension.”<\/p>\n

One of Nazeem’s most celebrated routines is his “12-and-a-half minutes of jokes about Israel” in a 2025 recorded special. The routine went up on YouTube and exploded internationally, with more than half a million views.<\/p>\n

Nazeem tells me about a Palestinian artist who came to one of the shows.<\/p>\n

“I did all my jokes including the Palestine material. And then afterwards he came back and said that he hadn’t laughed for the last couple of years. That was something that really mattered to me.”<\/p>\n

\"Nazeem<\/p>\n

Nazeem Hussain will star in the upcoming ABC TV series, Separated at Birth, alongside Urzila Carlson as paramedics who are best friends. (Supplied: ABC TV)<\/p>\n

Politics and the experience of being a brown man in a white culture are central to Nazeem’s comedy, but he is quick to point out that he’s not a university lecturer \u2014 he’s a comedian: there’s no use to any of it unless it’s funny. And there’s a careful calculation to how it works.<\/p>\n

“I tend to front-load the show with stuff that crosses lines a little bit. And I am a little bit more reckless with my words so that the audience knows that all bets are off \u2026 I’ve got my guard down … and they can also just relax it a little.<\/p>\n

“It doesn’t always land,” he admits.<\/p>\n

“A lot of the writing happens on stage because you might have an idea that’s funny, and you can only figure it out in front of an audience and find out whether they’re going to laugh.<\/p>\n

“And if they’re laughing, I just keep going. I’m greedy \u2014 I’m not shy to milk something dry.”<\/p>\n

Watch Creative Types with Virginia Trioli at 8:30pm Thursdays on ABC TV or stream anytime on ABC iview<\/a>. Nazeem Hussain’s show, I\u2019d Like to Tell You About Some Jokes, is at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival through April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The packed room at the Brisbane Powerhouse is howling. It’s a Sunday night crowd of couples, groups of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566383,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,272828,134,277167,6973,278575,278576,278577,174500],"class_list":["post-566382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-creative-types","tag-entertainment","tag-melbourne-comedy-festival","tag-melbourne-international-comedy-festival","tag-nazeem-hussain","tag-nazeem-hussain-gaza","tag-nazeem-hussain-israel","tag-virginia-trioli"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}