Late last year, Aussie comic Aamer Rahman was considering giving up standup. He and his partner Nazeem Hussain were disbanding their political comedy double act, Fear of a Brown Planet. Hussain had got himself a TV show, but, although the pair had been a hit at the 2011 Edinburgh festival, 31-year-old Rahman felt at the end with comedy. I thought, my audience is small, what Im doing is too niche. So, demob-happy at their last few gigs together, he performed a routine that didnt usually feature in the show. A lot of white people say this to me, the riff began. They say, Hey, Aamer, you get onstage and make your jokes about white people. Dont you think thats a kind of racism? Dont you think thats – dramatic pause – reverse racism? Six months later, that routine has been viewed by more than a million people on YouTube, and Rahmans early-retirement plans are on ice. In terms of the audience its generated for me, he says, its beyond anything Ive experienced before. Within a month of going online, the clip had been featured on Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and websites across the US. Then it just snowballed and got me more attention than Id gotten in a long time. theguardian/stage/2014/jun/04/aamer-rahman-reverse-racism-comedy-tour
Posted on: Thu, 12 Jun 2014 20:30:57 +0000
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