VIVA LA VIDA VISA…

So I was totally supposed to be famous by now. According to my math, October 2009 was to see me performing two shows at the Australian Comedy Festival, using the momentum from that to generate some press coverage, maybe do some television appearances and then take a few weeks out to write a novel. By December 2009 I would become the darling of the international comedy circuit, a celebrated wit and generally adored by all.

My math was off by a few numbers it seems. Didn’t put the decimal point after the right zero and forgot to carry the two. Oh and I forgot that I’m a Pakistani and thus generally shunned by immigration departments worldwide (except Sri Lanka it seems, which makes you wonder why they are so keen to experience the joys of avoidable terrorism).

Apparently the Australian Immigration Department thought I was too much of a security risk to grant a Performance Visa.

What’s scary about a comedian? Where they worried I would literally bomb on stage so hard I’d take out the whole front row! My pun’s would blow up in their faces? My witticisms will slice them like shrapnel?

Or maybe they thought this was all part of Osama Bin Laden’s elaborate plan? Take a skinny unassuming Pakistani, make him practice stand-up comedy in the caves of Jalalabad. Teach him classic extremist terrorist jokes:

What’s the difference between an American and Satan?
Nothing! Hahahahah!
It’s funny ’cause it’s true!

Then get him to perform in obscurity to audiences who hate comedy for 5 years and then let him be invited to a comedy festival in Australia. Once he is on stage then kaboom!

Okay, now that I say it out aloud it sounds kinda plausible.

So anyway, with no visa I ended up not going to Australia, not performing on stage and not becoming a world famous comedian who people write sonnets and epic poems about.

This feels like an appropriate metaphor for my life right now:

Oh shut up and let me wallow in self pity.

In the meantime, I decided to try my hand at finally starting my second attempt at a novel (after college I decided to put my English degree to use by writing a terrible terrible book called, with no hint of self-conscious pretension, “Summer Chai.” Thankfully I tossed the completed 300 page first draft into the dustbin shortly after finishing it). So far I’ve written three separate First Pages of three separate novels. One is the first Pakistani sci-fi novel, one is the first Pakistani fantasy novel and finally there is a noir mystery. You will find no epic South Asian family dramas here, nor a love story between a rich housewife and her lower caste driver or some such nonsense. Here, exclusively, are the first lines of each of these stories. Enjoy:

SCI-FI:
The rickshaw lifted into the sky, probability thrusters leaving contrails of info-vapor behind.

FANTASY:
Atif Shakoor’s father was a retired businessman and his mother was a djinn.

NOIR:
“I’ve been fucking him longer than I haven’t been fucking you,” she said, just before walking out the door.

So there you go. Maybe I should let a public vote decide which story to continue. Democracy seems to be all the rage these days after all.

Ah well, now I need to figure out what to do in 2010.

Pee, poo and susu…

So my mail box has been, surprisingly, quite choked with a number of emails all asking me the same question: “Where the fuck are you?”

It’s flattering to have so many people who actually want to know what I’m up to. It’s also frankly a bit disturbing. Maybe I should be twittering less about the various stages of discomfort in my genitalia and more about what I’m actually up to (perhaps I can combine the two. Each genital-related updated can be a metaphoric explanation of the goings-on in my life).

If I have to sum up my current activities in one word, that word would be “Diapers.” My beautiful, wonderful, glorious daughter has, at two months old, excreted enough suspicious looking substances to fill a mid-sized lake. My wife and I are, therefore, deluged in diapers (you remember “Deluged in Diapers” right? They opened for The Spin Doctors in ‘96. Nyuck nyuck!). We carry them with us wherever we go, they fill every empty space in the house. We fashioned a bed out of them and use it in the guest bedroom and if the apocalypse comes I’m probably going to shelter under a several hundred packs.

I have become a diaper expert. Pampers, for example, fits snugly but leaks. The locally produced brand leaks pee as well as poo. Essentially it is a comfortable sieve. The manufacturers seem to have misunderstood the basic function a diaper should provide. The imported Pampers, which are slightly more expensive, are slightly better designed. They contain the pee, but still provide the same amount of protection against poo as a used tissue would against a tsunami. Now Huggies is slightly better, provide more protection against both substances, but are not as readily available, which causes problems at 2:30 in the morning when you realize you are out. I have yet to try SUSU Diapers. Yes, “SUSU”. Oh to be a fly on the wall in the meeting when they decided the brand name.

“Peepee?”
“No, that’s silly. We can’t name a diaper after urination.”
“Weewee?”
“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”
“Caca?”
“Are you trying to piss me off!?”
“Doodoo?
“Security!”
“Susu!”
“Please escort this asshole out of…wait…what?”
“Susu.”
“Stand down everyone. I think we have a winner.”

So yes, SUSU Diapers. The packaging, which uses the severely underutilized Curlz font, that has sadly fallen out of favour with birthday banners and wedding shower announcement e-vites the world over, proudly proclaims that SUSU is an “alcohol free” diaper. Fucking what!? Alcohol free? Does that mean the other brands are full of booze? No wonder my daughter keeps peeing and pooing, she is getting hammered on her diaper! My poor baby has been turned into a corner wino by the insidious bastards at Pampers (although the alcohol content must be quite minimal. I barely got a buzz going after ingesting nearly an entire 20-pack of Huggies).

So yes, diapers. That has been my existence.

Oh, that and I quit Dawn News, the company that was my secondary place of residence for the last 3 years. No hard feelings or anything. They cancelled News Weakly, I didn’t feel like I had anything else I wanted to work on and an internationally affiliated advertising agency bribed me into becoming their Creative Director with scads of money and the promise of a corner office. The money, after taxes, becomes a great deal less than scads sadly, and the corner office is less an office and more a solitary confinement cell. Bowl of piss and side of toast not included.

The comedy thing has been a bit slow as a result. Keep planning on hammering out a new stand up show, but never really get the time to do it. Now that I’ve finished building my beautiful new website www.samishah.com, I can finally find the time to start working on some new acerbic witticisms.

Oh, and I will pretty soon be making a huge announcement on the comedy front. Won’t say anything until all the final pieces fall into place, and I am paranoid about jinxing it by talking about it, but soon. Hopefully. Soon.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some friends coming over and I need to finish the diaper punch I’m making. They may not get you drunk easily, but with some lemon, ginger and vermouth they taste great!

website is go…

After much beating and cajoling, www.samishah.com is finally up and running. Won’t you go see?

ANYA ARRIVES…

I can never be a woman.

Not that I plan on, lets just make that clear right now. This isn’t going be a post about my attempting to push my danglies between my legs and dress up in a skirt, so go fill your Trannie fetish somewhere else. Just making a point that has been brought home to me in the last few days. Being a woman requires far more patience, strength and resilience than I am capable of.

My wife went through close to 10 hours of labor on Friday and gave birth to a a devastatingly beautiful little girl. Then, just seconds after the doctor placed my daughter on her chest, my wife turned to me and said, “I’ve already forgotten about the pain I just went through.”

My daughter, Anya Shah, entered our atmosphere at 5:27 pm, on Friday the 8th of May. She is healthy, beautiful and making me more and more aware of how weak I am. Every time I look at her I go through the same cliched feelings of joy and surrender that I knew I would. That she is the gravitational center of my universe is of no surprise to anyone. That my wife can give birth and then do a 100 push ups while arm wrestling a Rhino is of no surprise to me.

What frightens me is how pathetic I seem in comparison.

Women like to joke about how if Men had to give birth the world’s resources would have been devoted to making it a painless and effortless procedure. It’s true though. Because if I had to go through what my wife just did I’d give up all of Pakistan’s secrets and throw in the Enigma code as well. Before the first contraction ended, even.

And now I look at my daughter, and I look at the world around me and hope she has her mother’s strength. Because mine would fail her in this wretched country. Pakistan as it is, has been and probably will remain, is a horrible place to be a woman. It’s misogynistic, oppressive and sadistic to women. And the whole fucking country uses the bullshit excuse of “God made me do it!” to justify itself. We are like a Psychopath who just refashioned his family into a new set of lampshades and then blames his actions on God speaking to him.

In Pakistan, a woman is stared at, harassed, belittled, abused, neglected, tortured and throughout it all blamed for everything that is happening to her. If I had to go through any of that, ever, I would suffer a series of psychotic breakdowns and either end up being arrested for driving my car over anyone with a penis who came in my way, or give up and sit in a corner curled up in a fetal position.

Yet my wife continues. She laughs and tells jokes and sings songs and makes things and brings Life into this world. And now my Anya will face the same challenges and same stupid stupid bigotry. And all I can pray for is that she has her mother’s strength. Because her father was too weak to even make this world a better place for her to come into.

Thank you, Anya. You have made me want to be stronger.

I SUCCUMB…

Tweet tweet…

IT’S A WRAP…

And so it ends.

26 weeks later, NEWS WEAKLY wraps up its final episodes.

26 weeks of little to no sleep. Of going over several hours of Reuters and AP footage every day. Of watching every news report filed by every bureau of Dawn News and sifting through miles and miles of political speeches. Of spending every Friday writing scripts for 12 to 16 hours at a go. Of Shooting on Saturday and then editing all day Sunday. Then spending Monday with tension headaches as the episode went on air. Then starting the whole cycle again.

And I wish I could do it all over again.

The show was a success by my standards. It succeeded as often as it failed. It got noticed by the people whose opinions I care about and it was one of the few things I’ve ever done that I am proud of.

Before you ask, the decision to close the show was mine. Yes, there were external factors, but the end decision lay with me. And I decided to go out on a high note.

I learned alot by doing this. I learned to write comedy, not when I feel like, but when I have to. I learned tricks in Final Cut Pro and Photoshop that would make an experienced Film Editor blush. And I learned, after a long long time, how to get comfortable in front of the camera. I can now confidently say I know how to write for T.V. and that I explored aspects of my comedic skills that I didn’t know I could have.

That doesn’t mean the show was a resounding success. Not at all. The viewership was small, but it was fanatical in its support. For that I thank everyone who sent words of encouragement and support. You can’t imagine how much they helped. However, it never broke into the larger audiences that Management wanted it to. Sometimes (some can say alot of times) it wasn’t funny. For a comedy show that’s a tough spot to be in. In my defence, I did the best I could each episode. That isn’t, unfortunately, always good enough.

But…but it got alot of laughs when it worked. It critiqued politics and world events in ways that people responded to from time to time.

I could go on…I think I could speak for hours on what News Weakly achieved and what I learned doing it. Ultimately though, it was a small show done as a labour of love by someone who is proud of how it turned out. Warts and all.

WHERE I’VE BEEN…

I have been busy. Really busy. More busy, in fact, than I have ever been in my life I think.

NEWS WEAKLY has consumed me. Being the sole Writer, Editor, Producer, Director and Host of a production intensive show like this is taking its toll. And that isn’t even considering the fact that I also Produce, Edit and Host another weekly show, CUTTING IT. It’s a movie review show that is well into its 40th episode now.

So this is my week now.

FRIDAY: Watch a weeks worth of Reuters and AP footage as well as any reports filed by our local correspondents on major national stories. Read through all the articles I’ve been highlighting and collecting all week. Despair for having bitten off more than I can chew, being a hack, relying on luck so far and wondering when it will run out. Write the script for NEWS WEAKLY. The process starts at 10:00 am and ends at 5:00 am the next morning. Moments of self-loathing are sporadic all day.

SATURDAY: Wake up after 5 hours of sleep filled with dreams of politicians and horses to rush to work. Do a final edit on the script and then shoot the studio portion. Capture the shot footage to a hard drive and bring it home where I can attempt to sleep again for a few hours. Wake up by 22:00pm and begin downloading any youtube footages and doing any photoshop work the episode requires. Usually of politicians and horses.

SUNDAY: The edit begins by noon. Hard disk attached to laptop and headphones embedded in my ear-canals, I begin working through Final Cut Pro. By the time the edit is done at around 5:00 am, I have beaten into submission a host of softwares. Final Cut Pro, Keynote, Adobe Photoshop, Livetype, Adobe Illustrator and Notepad. Trusty, reliable Notepad.

MONDAY: Sleep the sleep of the defeated for 5 hours, then drive to work with a bellyful of Redbull. Hand over ready-to-air NEWS WEAKLY. Hit make-up and begin shooting episode of CUTTING IT. Wrap up shoot by 18:00 pm, grab a bite to eat and then head over to FM89 where I co-host a radio show with the inimitable Omer Bilal Akhtar. We talk about politicians and horses on the air. Get home finally at 22:00pm. Sleep the sleep of the just.

TUESDAY: Stroll into work at a leisurely noontime and edit the recently shot episode of CUTTING IT. Hand it over to transmission to air. Sneak out early.

WEDNESDAY: Take the day off. Sleep. Eat. Rest. Oh, and watch three movies for next episode of CUTTING IT.

THURSDAY: Begin prep work for NEWS WEAKLY. Lots of searching through archived files, looking up political biographies and collating research. Uploading latest episode of NW to Youtube.

FRIDAY: The cycle begins anew. Politicians and horses.

After about three weeks of doing this (it’s been 16 weeks as of this writing by the way), I started to worry about a few things being lost. Social life was one. Reading was another. I am not to concerned about the lack of the former. I find social interactions mostly bothersome and often disappointing. There is a select group of people I prefer spending my time with and see them once a week on my day off. That is often enough for me. The latter though was worrying. People in media tend to be unimaginative and focused only on their task at hand. They spare little time for reading and thus develop their minds to a shockingly limited degree. It’s why you never see any new viewpoints or perspectives on television. All you see is a lizard swallowing its own tail.

For me reading is more than an obsession. It is my way of life. My immense spectacles are evidence of that. But time is not on my side. Thus, podcasts and audiobooks.

God bless Audiobooks. You can listen to them while driving, while in the bathroom, while eating. Anytime almost. I try to go through at least 2 a week when possible. If an audiobook is not available though, then I fight to make time for the more traditional format.

Currently reading

: CURFEWED NIGHT and listening to MILLENIUM.

My other pleasure is Podcasts. These wonderful short bursts of audio ingenuity have rendered my iPod useless as a music-playing device.

Currently listening to

: NEVER NOT FUNNY. A weekly free-for-all between my favorite comedians and their friends. It has always been and probably always will be my favorite podcast.

THE HISTORY OF ROME. A detailed narrative on the history of the Ancient Rome, told with passion and an attention to minutiae.

DAN CARLIN’S HARDCORE HISTORY. Carlin views history from angles that it isn’t often looked at from. Fascinating and addictive.

GEEKS ON. Geeks talking about geek stuff. ‘Nuff said.

THE BUGLE. Brit comic Andy Zaltsman and The Daily Show’s Jon Oliver punch current events in the face. This show inspired NEWS WEAKLY more than anything else. Always hilarious.

START THE WEEK WITH ANDREW MARR. A weekly round table discussion between innovators and thinkers on a variety of subjects that is conducted with the ease and intellectual comfort that only the BBC can provide.

STEPHEN FRY’S PODGRAMS. One of the greatest comedians of the modern age turned out to be one of the greatest overall minds of the modern age. Listen to him talk about his hatred of dancing and why he loves technology.

and, THE 40 YEAR OLD BOY. A former member of the NEVER NOT FUNNY team goes solo with a weekly rant about weight loss, childhood and punching peoples faces.

And in between it all, I am still watching every episode of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA as it appears. Final season. The show is firing on all cylinders now. God, what will I watch when it’s gone.

Oh, and I recently wrote a two part essay about doing comedy in Pakistan for Punchline Magazine.

PART I and PART II. Comedy Central’s Insider Blog liked it.

There. So that’s why I hardly ever update my blog anymore. Won’t you forgive me?

PUNCHLINED…

Squeee!

Punchline Magazine just posted the first of a two part series they asked me to write about being a comedian in Pakistan

Go read it here. It’s smart, funny and erudite. I may be biased though, since I wrote it.

Then Comedy Central’s blog picked it up and wrote a nice review of it and me.

Go read it here. It’s insightful, brilliant and qualitative.

Working on the second part of the essay right now. It will be more about NEWS WEAKLY and why I continue to do comedy. It’ll be concise, formatted and full of vowels.

NEWS WEAKLY – EP.01

TITLE

I never wanted to do comedy on Television. Ever. Absolutely abhored the idea. The main reason was the lack of quality control in Pakistani teevee (yes I spell it that way on purpose!). Every show had poor production value and the comedy was always pandering.

Then I decided to stop being an elitist dick.

A few months back I started performing comedy in Second Life, and each weekly show would feature a segment called NEWS WEAK, wherein I would do some current affairs stuff. Basic picking on the headlines things. It was good writing practice and I enjoyed making disposable comedy like that. It is redundant after a week and that is a challenge. I did that for several weeks before deciding to try it as a special stand-up show in Real Life.

So a couple of months back I did that. One-off comedy performance that was focused on major news stories.

And the idea didn’t go away. The biggest challenge was making sure it wasn’t compared to THE DAILY SHOW and COLBERT REPORT. That had me paralyzed for the longest time. Then my wife pointed out that any News Comedy show will always be compared to those two. But if the jokes are good, then people will start to respect it as its own thing. So no pressure.

I cast around for a team to work with and found no one available or capable. The end result then is a product of my OCD control-freak behavior.

NEWS WEAKLY debuts tonight on Dawn News.

Written, Produced, Directed, Hosted & Edited by me. I had input on the writing end from two wonderful writers, Umbereen Baig Mirza and Rafay Alam. But other than that, I make the visuals, I edit the reports, I write the final script. I did everything damn thing on this show. So if it doesn’t work I am to blame. But it is the first thing I have ever done on teevee that I am proud of. And that makes it worth it to me.

NEWS WEAKLY

Monday, 3rd November.

23:05 pm.

Headlines with Punchlines.

COMING SOON…REAL SOON…

make with the clicky: