The Chaser Report - The Cuck Strikes Back | Sami Shah

Episode Date: November 26, 2021

The hilarious Sami Shah once again joins Gabbi and Dom for our Afternoon Edition, which for once doesn't result in our lawyers losing sleep. Sami talks about his radical new change in appearance, his brand new comedy show "Cuck" and the real-life story it revolves around, as well as where and how he learnt comedy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to an afternoon edition of The Chaser Report. In a moment, Sammy Schar is going to join Gabby Bolt and me, Dom Knight. Hello. And it's a brand new, Sammy Schar, without glasses. Let's find out why. What? In just a moment.

The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Sammy Schar, you were handsome before. Now you're beautiful. Thank you very much, Dom. Well, so yeah, I've been wearing spectacles since I was... Okay, so firstly, do you say spectacles or glasses in Australia? We say glasses, but I prefer spectacles. I prefer spectacles.

I prefer spectacles. Add some class to our discourse, Sammy. I just feel like it's clarity. Otherwise, you could say that I've been wearing glasses and you just sound like you're wearing drinking glasses on your body. We say specks. We love shortening things here, as you know. Speckies. Very true. All right, so let's go with specs.

I've been wearing specks since I was six years old. And then, you know, in lockdown. like everyone does this thing where they like um yeah and i'm sure you guys went through it as well it's like what am i doing in my life yeah what do i you know i know people who like who started skiing or or or surfing or skydiving murdering yeah yeah exactly you know things you've always wanted to do and so for me it was looking i really like looking that's correct i want to try looking i decided saying yeah i thought that would be a good way to go and so yeah i signed up i went to the doctor and they said that they have to do lasers

but I want to get laser surgery but they offered me an even better option where they'd literally A knock you out I've never had anesthesia it's the best thing on earth but they basically make micro incisions in your eye and then they go into your eye

and they dissolve the natural lens that's in your eye and then they put a fake lens inside your eye and then they sew up the micro incisions and I was thinking like this guy knows all this Like, he's dedicated his life. He's an amazing Chinese doctor who just is a master of what he does. Just unbelievable knowledge and skill and everything. And I figured, you know what?

I just do my own research. So my body, my choice. And so I just went on YouTube and I realized that Joe Rogan told me I can just not wear my glasses. And so I don't wear them anymore. I'm blind. I still can't see shit. But I just drive around everywhere in blurry world. Yeah.

Do you find that you're happier? I think if I could see less, I think I'd be happy. The problem is I can still see news headlines. And that's the one kind of thing I needed blocked out. Rats. No, but it's amazing. I can see. I went and got the thing done.

They knocked me out. He put the lenses in. I was cyborg now, which is exciting for me as well. Wow. Amazing. So I presume that they dripped some sort of ibenectin into your eyes. Is that what they did? Well, I just told them to give me the full Facebook package.

So now I just get, like all of Facebook marketplace is basically in my eye. eyes. I'm just scrolling through secondhand wardrobes all day long now is how I exist. Did you get some sort of augmented thing like where Mark Zuckerberg, yeah, can beam messages and advertising directly onto your retina? Yeah, I mean, that's largely how we all exist anyway. It just takes out the middleman and the middle man in this case being, you know, the phone or the computer that you have at arm's length. So now I just get it directly there. It's been wonderful. It's been crazy. I literally don't wear glasses anymore. I mean, I have a pair like reading glasses, but then I get to do like cool old man Robert De Niro in casino kind of stuff

you know where he like he puts the glasses on on the edge of his nose and then holds something at arm's length and looks down at it and I feel like I'm in a Martin Scorsese movie every time I do that you can fully impress people with your glasses choreography there's a bit of that isn't there like sometimes like you do like the double shake to get the arms out oh yeah I need glasses to drive I do not wear them I'm technically supposed to but yeah And you do like the whole...

But technically, do you mean legally? Yeah, yeah. Well... Yeah. So in order to drive, the government has said to you, Gabby Bolt, glasses or nothing. Well, sort of. It's just to see signs from very, very far away. I mean, why would you need to do that while, I don't know.

Nothing good on those signs anyway, ever. So can you hook Gabby up with your doctor, Sammy? Yeah, I want to be a robot. Get the whole eye, put the eye in ivermectin. Yeah, it's fantastic. I don't know, have any of you ever been an anesthetized before? No, but my best friend's brother is an anesthesiologist, and the job sounds lit. You just rock up for 15 minutes, knock people out and piss off.

It's great. I've heard it being described as, it's usually the most boring job in the world until your patient has a breathing problem, and then it's the most terrifying job in the world. So here's what I did. I snore so severely. The first time they knocked me out, they weren't anticipating that. And I wish they would give me some video footage of their reaction when I started snoring, because the next day when I went in for the other eye

the anesthesiologist said you snore so badly we're going to have to put a hose down your throat because we're worried you'll choke to death while sleeping What a backhanded compliment that is Yeah I feel like that's why you Why you snore shaming me man I'm bad enough that I've been self-conscious

about my eyes my whole life I'm finally fixing one problem Now I've got a whole other thing to worry about Which I mean to be fair He's not the first person to complain about my snoring Multiple ex-wives have done the same When God opens an eye He closes a nasal passage

That's exactly what it is Well, I mean look You are, you're a new man though It's exciting You mentioned the multiplex wives Sammy And I really admire I mean my personal life is far duller Than yours

I would have liked a dull personal life You want a dull personal life I would have appreciated that in retrospect But yes I admire the way that you turn Misery into art and that, in fact, you've released your stand-up show, which I really wanted to see last year and missed cuck

about your romantic misadventures. That's now available on streaming services. People can go and spend an hour wallowing in your life. I mean, what a wonderful public service that is. If you're feeling bad about your relationship... Absolutely. Sammy's going to tell you a story. And I only know the broad outline of what you went through.

But it sounds excruciating, but potentially also very funny. Look, it's the comedy album equivalent. of a Morrissey release, you know, it's just as depressing and nihilistic, but hopefully there's punchlines at the end of all of it, which, you know, will make all of a difference. And yeah, it's a comedy album I lost, so basically not last year, for those who don't know, and I don't know why anyone would know, my marriage ended abruptly when my partner decided that she was polyamorous abruptly overnight, but polyamorous just towards one person, which I believe in traditional middle ages, they used to call that cheating, but these days the cool kids

call it polyamory. And so I did a comedy album about it because it happened just before lockdown started, which really made lockdown fun. There's nothing like just staring at the middle distance while listening to, you know, Slayer's album for six months at a time. So I thought I might as well do something good out of that. And much like Hannah Gatsby's Nanette, I have Sammy Shah's cuck. Except, you know, one of those is probably one of the most seminal comedy albums of all time and has a huge cultural influence, and the other one is Hannah Gatsby's work. So I know I'm going to have to Hannah, by the way.

I mean, the term cuck is spanned about so much these days online. It's a Republican in the US sort of use it to shame Republicans who aren't hardcore enough. But you, I like that you are taking it back to where the term began to talk about. The O.G. His wives, you know, stepped out. Yes. The original Shakespearean meaning of the word, which comes from cuckold, which is the unfaithful. And yeah, I actually wanted to go full nerd.

And apparently in Victorian England, a cacold was depicted in Shakespeare plays with horns coming out of his head. And there's a whole story there that no one needs to know. And I thought, I'd put that in my poster. And then I realized no one would know why. Like, no one would get the reference. They were just being like, why did he? Is he the devil now? Why is he an antelope?

What's going on? Oh, that sort of horned. Really? yeah yeah yeah wow yeah that would have been confusing um i've heard people say like wearing horns as a metaphor for that but not the image there you go yeah man as antelope man as antelope man as antelope but instead you get man with comedy album and that's available on itunes on spotify on apple music uh and just look up cock c u ck uh and you know the way the metrics work if a million people listen to this and it becomes the most listened to album since taylor

Swift's latest out and release, I might get $5. That's true. I like that you spelt it out because we all know what putting cock into a web browser will unleash. A world of fun. Yeah, you can get messages as though they were from the Australian cricket captain. Yeah, oh, topical.

I like it. The Chaser Report, less news, less often. For your loyal Patreon subscribers, you've been sharing bits and pieces of work in progress. And this is exciting because both of you, Gabby and Sammy, creating shows and doing stuff and trying stuff and live comedy is back and I

never do any of that stuff because I'm chicken. Terrify. The two of you do this. Sammy, I'm not familiar with comedians being so brave as to put up work in progress. I know people do it in little rooms in front of audiences that, you know, they select in many cases, but you're going full bore and just putting it out there. What's the process there? So here's the thinking, right?

So I learned how to do stand-up comedy in Pakistan. It was just me alone at home downloading stuff from the internet. And a lot of stuff, this is back in the day of LimeWire or Napster or whatever. I used to download pirate comedy albums, you know, a lot of comedians in the early 2000s would put up their comedy albums or people who fans put them up. But the other thing that sometimes very rarely I would find would be some comedian uploaded a file of them at an open mic night. Or someone at an open mic and I'd recorded a comedian and put it up on the internet. You know, before Twitter and all that stuff, the stuff was on message forums for comedy nerds.

And I used to listen to that and learned to do comedy that way. I learned to go, that's what the bit was like when it was raw. That's the person working it out. And that's the finished product and the difference between all those. And it felt kind of cool. It felt like a kid who wants to become a chef seeing for the first time how the sausage is made. And I thought, you know, hopefully, I don't know,

maybe someone will find the same kind of excitement from hearing a shitty bit about, you know, you know, culture, society or whatever, that I'm now working and working and refining, which will eventually become a good stand-up comedy routine. It might not, or it might. But, you know, hopefully it's for comedy nerds, of which I am a huge one, and I suppose I'm hoping there's others out there still. It's a great process, isn't it?

Because it's one of the few situations where you get completely honest feedback. There's something about laughter. People don't choose to laugh. Somehow the brain short circuits weighing things up rationally, and if you find something funny, you just laugh. But then if you do it enough times in front of audiences, and we have done this in live shows with the chaser over the years, or we did something, you know, 50 times or something.

And then by the 50th time, we worked out probably the best possible version of the joke. Exactly. Just by not wanting things to go clang when you say them out loud. Well, it's easier for me because I'm not putting it to music. So like Gabby, when you're trying material out to music, how do you make changes if something falls flat? You usually just make something else. Like, I've relied on thesaurusers my entire life.

RhymeZone.com. Yeah, a lot of like, if I really, really like the way a rhyme sounds, but the joke just doesn't work, then I just change the line. Like, I actually feel a lot, I feel a lot better about it because it gives me a restriction. Like, I have to work within the framework of a song or a line. So it's a lot easier to, I don't know, I find it a lot easy to change that. But the thing I get stuck on is the banter. Like when my banter doesn't work before a song, or like,

the speaking points in my show don't work. I'm fucked. Because I'm literally just like, oh, is the whole idea bad? I have to change the whole thing. And also now you're trapped in a song for the next four minutes that you have to do all the way through

but they're not laughing in first five seconds. Oh, yeah. Containing an insight that the audience rejected before you started. Yeah. Yeah, well, I do have a song actually that I just tested at the comedy store and at the factory theater

and it was really funny because of course I didn't think it through. It's about parenting. And the first, I can sort of give it away, I suppose. No one's really going to go digging for it. The first verse is about being a parent. And I try and fool the audience into thinking that I'm a new parent. And I say at the very beginning of the song, I go, any parents tonight?

It's a Wednesday night at the comedy store. Of course there's no parents in the crowd. So I go out there and I'm like, any parents tonight? And I hear one person go, yep. Yeah, yeah, my partner's got the kid. Yeah, and so I had to sort of play very on the spot of like, oh, same, you know, same here. Oh, yeah, it's a tough slog being a parent, isn't it? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Because the fake out is the first verse is about having a child and oh my God, how beautiful and how wonderful. And then the chorus hits and the chorus goes, thank fuck you're not mine. And so having people waiting like a whole minute and a half to hear the first punchline is terrifying. Terrifying. That's a high wire action. And so, yeah, but that's the stuff I love. I love that about comedy. I love figuring out the nuts and bolts of it.

And so, yeah, hopefully on my Patreon, people can find stuff like that. Does that work? Does the Patreon system work? I've said a lot of people do it. People have suggested that we put this podcast on the Patreon. We may be doing some kind of membership thing in the new year. You don't want to, you know, reveal any secrets. But we're talking about bonuses, as though 10 episodes a week wasn't enough.

Bonus stuff for subscribers and so on. But it seems like people are making a go out of Patreon as a platform. have you found it? Okay, so I think it depends on why you come to it. Everyone I know who's successful with it got tired of waiting for someone to curate their work for them. So my favorite patrons, you know, patrons, for example, or patrons, there are people who create stuff on Patreon. Monica Byrne is one. Monica Byrne is a writer. She's in America. She wrote short stories. She discovered that short story publication doesn't really pay you very much and getting good short story publish is very difficult. She made a thing where she said, you know what, give me money.

I'll send you my short stories directly. Her fan started doing that, and she sent them my short stories directly, ended up earning enough money doing it to be able to take time off from work and finish her next novel. Alice Frazier is a perfect example. Alice Frazier is this amazing comedian,

brilliant satirist, who's got a big audience, who knows where to find her, because she puts everything on her Patreon, and she doesn't have to rely on the mainstream, you know, ABC TV or Australian television or media or whatever to give, acknowledge her. She's got her audience now,

which is huge and loyal. and supports things. And so for me, it also came from the same thing. I like making news satire. I like writing, you know, satirical content for people who are news savvy. And I figured I'm tired of waiting for someone to say, hey, you can publish it on our website or on our newspaper. I'll just go directly to people who like my stuff.

And they've been lovely. They've found me and they're helping pay my rent. And that allows me to make more content for them. That is a fantastic thing. I mean, we're lucky here at the Chaser to be a legacy media of sorts, having been around so long. But I'm sure that would have been the way. I mean, we did that initially with the newspaper where you had to print it

and send it out and all this kind of stuff. And it was hugely complicated and involved a lot of admin, which we sucked at. And so fortunately, our subscribers tended to understand that we were also hopeless and thought it was funny, thank God. So they bore with us. But much easier digitally, if you're just putting stuff up and sharing it, there's no costs of printing and postage and all the things that ensured that this company was pretty much broke from the beginning.

And then, yes, okay, for a while, gatekeepers paid us to make television shows, and that was great. But it does mean that this is intermediary. And the people who get to make decisions about what happens, you know, thank you to those who were nice just in the past. But you can't rely on them, can you? You can't have a career. You can't have decades of that sort of approval.

That's very rare. Yeah, and we're all just comedians. We like making stuff we're making, and we're going to keep making it whether someone pays us or not. So it's really lovely when people, do offer to pay. So your Patreon is what? Patreon.com slash Sammy Shah, S-M-I-S-H-H-A-H.

There's a whole new essay about to come out probably in the next few days about life without spectacles. Not the most scintillating thing. Definitely not to anything anyone would want to pay money to listen to or read, but it's coming, whether you like it or not. Cindulating for those who do have spectacles and might want to make a jump. All right. Yes.

Hey, Sammy, nice to talk comedy shop with you for a bit rather than diving into some latest outrage at the week, but we'll do that again next time, shall we'll be back with that next week for sure. Thank you, Sammy. Thanks, Dom. Thanks, Gabby. Thanks, Sammy. The Chaser Report, news you know you can't trust. And if you enjoyed that afternoon in addition with Sammy Shah, make sure you check out his podcast. It's called News Weekly with an A and once again, Patreon.com slash Sammy Shah, S-A-H-H-A-H. Our gears from from Road Microfronts, we're part of the A-Cast Creator Network. Catch you later.