The Chaser Report - Ukraine on the Membrane | Sami Shah

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

Sami Shah joins Dom and Charles to rip into everything and everyone. Ukraine. The Queen. Comedy awards. Iran. AFL. The Little Mermaid. Pakistan. The news. Costa Georgiadis. Nobody is safe, nothing is sacred. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence This is the Chaser Report Hello and welcome to the Chaser Report For Monday the 26th of September I'm Charles Firth And with me today are Dom Knight Hello I'm back

Yay and Sammy Shah Hello I am also back Yay Well where have you both but where have you been Dom I have been in a Look, you're basically in a cave. Yes. I went into a cave with a whole bunch of raw memorabilia.

Just to pay tribute and respect. Because I'm such a fan. You basically disappeared the moment the queen died. Yeah, look, I couldn't cope. Yes. To me, she's still alive. To me, it sounds suspicious. To me, it sounds like he was in hiding until the evidence was clear.

That's right. It's all in a lead line. Well, I mean, it was very suspicious, just, you know, a queen cut down in her prime like that. Yeah, absolutely. 94. I mean, they're not fair at all to her. It's all died of old age thing. Please, we know, we know what the how the tutors and everyone. Like, they live to 160. This was a midlife point. She was just about to get a sports car. I started banging a young boy.

And where have you been, Sammy? Like Dom, I was bereft. I was upset. I was heartbroken. I was weeping. I lit a candle and stood in my, on my balcony, singing Elton Jones. songs for the last few days, basically. But can I tell you what happened to me on Thursday, which was the Queen's National Day of Morning, was I was in IKEA with my son.

That's a traditional place to pay respects. Yeah, as she would have watched it, exactly. She loved flat pack furniture. And Swedish meatballs. She would have had Swedish blood anyway, wouldn't she? Oh, doubtlessly. German. German.

So, and then at 11 o'clock they announced, they said, We are now going to have a minute silent to remember the queen. In IKEA. In IKEA. And everyone stopped. And it was like a proper, except for me in Angus because I was thinking, but the queen, like, deserves to die.

Like, she's an awful person. She was just a horrible woman who used her power and privilege to retain her power and privilege. Did you think that? Or did you say it loudly? No. Because Charles has no way of speaking. softly. He's the loudest man in the world. Did you say that loudly in IKEA in thousands of grieving silent things?

Charles, Charles is now the only person banned from IKEA, other than whoever was caught masturbating in on IKEA furniture last week, probably. Which would be a very inappropriate way to pay one's respects. Anyway, I paid my lack of respect by continuing to test out the beds. We're in the bed sections. But I'm very glad, Charles, that you're still, you know, talking about it. Because even other media outlets have stopped. As of this Monday, everyone's finally taking it a break.

But here at the Charter Report, the disdain continues. If you go to the ABC front page, the ABC News website front page, you know they've got tabs on top. And it used to be like just in, which are the breaking news, coronavirus, politics, world business. There's been a tab for Queen's death now, which is still up there. So if there's any breaking news about her death, that's the place you're going to find it. And is it under the tab just to... happened three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's under the tab. We still sent radio presenters to London to report on this because we're fucking idiots. There's justine and far from Justin, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, Sammy, I hear you're a bit of a hit in the Ukraine. I am. I'm insane in the Ukraine. So basically, there's a Ukrainian stand-up comedian named Anton Timoshenko.

And he does, if you go online on. YouTube. There are clips of him doing stand-up comedy in a bunker. Like, he's not even messing around. Like, he's probably, like, he's not bombing, like, the country around him is being bombed, but he's doing great. And, um, and, and he's killing. He's killed. I mean, Putin's killing. And, and basically, Putin's killing anyone standing near a window these days is what's currently happening. But, uh, yeah, Anton Timoshenko found a clip of mine where I had done stand-up comedy about six, seven months ago and had made a joke

about the Ukraine stuff and my joke at the time had been like that no one cares anymore we'd already moved on I thought it was a war because it was full of white people and when white people fight it's a war

but now we've even downgraded it to a conflict which shows how little we give a shit and he posted that up on his Instagram and he said this is so funny and now I have thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians

telling me I'm really funny which is something I've never gotten from either Australians or Pakistanis so I need to move That's wonderful It's just goes to show how In a time of conflict and tragedy The bar for comedy goes so much lower

Yeah Are you going to move there Is that? Yeah why not I'm basically about to become the Dave Hughes of Ukrainian comedy Well you know They've requested the embassy to be reopened

And I know you don't have an Australian passport But I think you could be our ambassador Certainly our comedy ambassadors Of course I have an Australian passport Sorry, sorry, I forgot you don't You have a jeal- Are you trying to go back when I came from, Dom? Is that just subtle way?

I was suggesting you run for Parliament at one point And you said, oh, I can't give up the Pakistani passport And fair enough But you can be, surely you can be the... Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, why do you want your Pakistani passport? Didn't they try and kill you? Isn't the whole reason you left?

Yeah, I mean, look, they're not fans of my work. But I don't know why I haven't given it. I think because giving up the passport feels a bit like giving up a part of my identity. It's that last guy. It's like a vestigial stump or something. And then you'd be 100% Australian and no one. No one wants that. Nobody.

Then I have to get a Southern Cross tattoo. And I got to start wearing a flag every Australia day. It just, I feel like a cunt. And yeah. You could get a Ukrainian passport, though. You're clearly on a Ukrainian at this point. And I suspect that that passport currently isn't the hardest thing in the world to get. No, no, I don't think there's a big immigration into Ukraine movement right now.

So I think it's just me and a whole bunch of, you know, rebel freedom fighters and stuff. But yeah, so I think right now this is my next move. My lateral move in comedy is going to be learning Ukrainian and doing Ukrainian comedy. You find yourself having to come up with more Ukrainian, angle of gear? Like, do you find there's a bit of pressure to sort of

keep on with the Ukrainian jokes? I didn't, I mean, I wasn't planning on doing a whole hour of Ukrainian stand-up comedy at the next Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

But it turns out that might be my only chance of ever getting nominated for an award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival given the fact that I'm not gay. So, which is apparently the only way to win an award there

is to be LGBTIQI and white. Yeah, I fucking said it. So, but I think the thing about it is... It is great to say a brown man getting cancelled. Can I just say? It is refreshing. It's been a while since Aziz Ansari and, you know, I've had a good run.

But no, here's the thing that I find really interesting. Because you wouldn't even have to be funny if it was about the Ukraine. Yes, because it would be poignant. It would all be point. Yeah, you could just be sort of like... Which is literally all you have to do to win an award at most comedy festivals now. You see that? Every time someone wins an award.

people come out and they're like, I cried so much. Weren't you in a comedy show? What the fuck is going on? I remember about 10 years ago when I last went to the festival a lot. I saw about five shows in a row that were quite good and about two-thirds of the way through, suddenly it was some horrible revelation from the past. It was like, holy shit.

And they'd clearly, I didn't even know if they'd mad at it, but it was like they'd been abused or whatever. And it's just, it became so formulaic that it's kind of like, if you didn't have a horrible trauma in your past, like my father didn't love me. And we had to make one up. And I remember there was one comedian who refused to do that

who said, I'm just going to tell gags instead. And it was like, oh, God, he should be cancelled. Yeah, I didn't want to. How shallow. No, I think you should do a Ukraine hour. What would you call it? Ukraine in the membrane? For sure, Ukraine on the membrane.

The funniest part, though, is Anton Tomi-Shenko and I've been messaging back and forth and he and I've been chatting about you know what's it like to do comedy in a war zone and all these things and he said hey I want to see more of your comedy send me like a clip of your comedy special or something so what my my comedy festival show like two years ago from the Melbourne National Comedy Festival I have the whole video of that it was just recorded from like a basically security camera in the comedy public venue and so I bunged that on YouTube a while ago and he so he watches it and he's like hey that was really funny why have only 13 people seen this?

Why has no one ever seen this? And I was like, look, man, I hate doing socials. I hate self-promotion. I just want to do comedy. And he's like, you know what? Yeah, I'm so sick of social media and stuff. I just want to do comedy too. I'm like, well, maybe you should focus on living first. I don't worry about the promotional part of comedy.

Can I win you the best show award at the next Melbourne Comedy Festival? I know it's hard to get. What you should do is do an hour co-hosted with him on stream from Ukraine. Yes. Live in the, so like live directly from Ukraine. Live from the bunker. With you each night, co-host it, they'd have to give it to you. That would be impossible not to give it to you.

No, with my luck, they'll give it to him. And here's what I'll say. I want that for him, but not at my expense. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecues lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that actually they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over deliver. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. He was saying, I asked him, I was like, you want to come to Australia?

Like, when you're able to get out, you should come here. I'm sure you have an amazing run of shows. And he's like, I'll be very honest, I'm more scared of spiders than I am of bombs. Wow. That was like, yeah, fair enough. But isn't that an indictment of Vladimir Putin's war effort at this point? It is.

He's more worried about hypothetical arachnance than the Russian army. Who would have thought that at the start of this conflict? At this point, anyway, you're more likely to be killed. by a falling billionaire oligarch thrown out of a window than by an actual missile sent by the Russian army so you know

Although it will that be true though because Putin just last week mobilized 300,000 extra troops Yeah Well he mobilized them And then 300,000 extra Russians took flight straight out of Russia Straight to Turkey

Did you see how much it cost To fly from Moscow to Dubai Was $13,000 for an economy ticket Yeah Dubai is suddenly going to have a huge increase in Russian tourists out of nowhere. So, yeah, it's a good time to learn Russian and sell T-shirts. So you're predicting that Russia can't win the... Because I sort of thought, well, maybe, you know, extra 300,000.

It's got a lot of people to throw out. I mean, yeah, but at this point, it's become that thing of, like, it's just... Russia's now losing a war in Ukraine after having a previously lost a war in Afghanistan. and it goes back like, it's like Russia had lost a war in Finland before the Second World War and basically the lesson is Russia is not good at invading. Russia is shit invading. Don't invade Russia. Don't invade Russia.

That's a classic mistake. That's a classic mistake that everyone makes. But also Russia shouldn't. Yeah, exactly. Who hasn't, right? And the irony is that Putin knows that. And he also thinks that Ukraine is Russia. So in a way he invaded Russia, even though he knew don't invade Russia. Oh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Claverett, you should explain that term and get him to stop the war. I know. No one's told him in those words. Exactly, Charles. I recommend you travel to Russia and get an audience. Well, I think the flights would be very cheap one way.

But no, it is strange that we're at this point. And basically, Ukraine's kind of almost one. And there's still plenty of territory that Russia controls. But Russia's literally all that they can really do to win is just completely blow the place up, thereby ensuring that the fallout falls comes directly back into Russia. I don't know. I'm assuming that it's too close to use nukes. But they'll hold the referendums and whatever remaining bits that they've managed to take,

they'll win the referendums there and then they'll go, okay, well, that was all we were ever aiming for anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that'll be a way to claim. A truce, you know, it was a draw. It'll be, it's a peric victory thing at this point. was interesting though is and getting this message from him and stuff and it's only because i also have been talking about ukraine on my on on news weekly uh my my my weekly new satire

podcast that's w a k l y it's available on any podcast app right now uh but i talk about ukraine on it still regularly because my whole goal is to talk about stories that other people aren't talking about and it's crazy no one gives the shit about ukraine anymore like the the joke i made last week and it's not even a joke it's just an observation at this point is we would have to recast Zelensky as a black woman just to get anyone to pay attention on social media anymore. Like, it's completely a forgotten news topic.

There's more ire debaten and anger over a little mermaid. Yeah, then there is about the fact that Ukraine is actually kicking Russia's ass in this war, finally. You should have a chat to the PR people in the Ukraine because you've probably got their ear now. Yeah, that's right. I'm big there now. I'm big deal. But it's so bizarre, though. Because I didn't know, I had no idea.

One day I just turned on my Instagram a few days, ago. And there was just all these likes, like an insane amount of likes. And I was like, that's not a thing that I've ever experienced. Something's gone wrong. I have no idea. I've logged into Adam Hills as a car. Clearly, clearly this is not my experience on social media at all. And I went online. And it was just all Ukrainians. Just Ukrainians, Ukrainians, and comments in this comment section in Ukrainian talking to each other and and laughing and commenting and I had to click the translate button and it turns out that's not very accurate. And then finally I found that this one guy had tweeted, had put my story on his Instagram.

So yeah, I just feel like, you know, I'm going to make the big time now. I don't know what the Ukrainian currency is worth, but I'm going to start charging in that because it's my best chance of success. Patreon. Yeah, do Patreon. I'm going to ride this wave of legitimacy provided by the Ukrainians the same way every Western world leader has written the wave of legitimacy. provided by proximity to Zelensky.

You're going to be the Boris Johnson of comedy. Exactly. Many people have said that about me, Dom. I always took it as an insult, but now. You've had enough fiancés, haven't you? Actually, that's true. That's actually a fair point. How are you going to get cancelled, though, in Ukraine?

I mean, what option is it only being pro-Russian that you get cancelled for? I think you could find another way, Sammy. I'm pretty sure anyone who says, anything shitty about Zelensky would be cancelled and rightfully so probably but yeah i don't know i don't think the ukrainians are very focused on cancellations right now they seem little distracted by other issues i haven't asked them themselves i mean on my thing with delenski i admire him very much but uh but plays plays the t-shirt oh you don't think that's a good look what's wrong with this he's got a standard open my comedian look which is every open my comedian is in a tight-fitting

t-shirt and yeah that's a he's he's a comedian at heart No, you've got to respect the game. I mean, if he'd been invited, if he'd been able to come to the Queen's funeral, he would have turned up in the T-shirt. Exactly. I actually love it because it does, every time you see it, it's like, oh yeah, he's too busy to, like, get dressed in a suit. Yeah, yeah.

He communicates it very well. Now, I just want to talk about another topic, you know, a bit round the grounds. Let's have a bit of an international focus. Iran seems to sort of be collapsing. What's going, do you have any? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's an incredible story. So if you don't know, because for some reason,

international world media is still obsessed with burying the queen than anything else. I know nothing about this at all, but I do know quite a lot of facts about the kinds of jokes that Her Majesty really enjoyed. Apparently, lots of jokes, yet none, were allowed to be made about her. She had a great sense of humor unless and until you make a joke about her. So in the real world where actual people's lives matter, in Iran there was

unfortunately a woman named Masa Amini and Masa Amini was wearing a hijab the way all Iranian women are forced to wear

the hijab but she was wearing it Iran's way like Iranian women have a very or at least the progressive ones have a very laissez-faire attitude

towards the hijab they put it on but they don't kind of tighten it around their hair and everything it's just a perfunctory thing Pakistan has had similar stuff in the past

and so she had the hijab on her head and the morality police over there, which is a real thing that you have in certain shitty countries. The morality police beat her up for not wearing it properly. The beating

was so severe, she died as a result of it. And this has happened before in Iran. Iran isn't a place where this stuff doesn't happen. It happens from time to time. But I think it's one of those straw breaks the camel's back things. And now you're seeing massive protests around the country. And here's the thing.

What's interesting is Iran has protests regularly. The protest in Iran are always pushing against the government. The government is extremely violent. It's extremely oppressive. And the protesters are always, you know, pushing against the government and then getting shut down, you know, because the government still holds a, what's it called? It's a sort of police state.

Well, I mean, yeah. They hold the- They've got a monopoly on violence. That's the phrase I was going for, monopoly on violence. Sorry. So, you know, they have that. But every time the protest happens, the protesters are pushing more and more. One of the things we're seeing now is the protesters are actually ripping down posters of Raezy,

who's the Iranian president and a giant monstrous piece of shit. They're throwing the finger to Khaminai, who is the successor to Imam Khomeini, who himself is now in his 80s and hopefully will turn to manure soon when he dies. And they're basically signing upward. And you're seeing this remarkable kind of protest movement happening. And it's really interesting to see how the world is really not giving. much of a shit about it beyond just like a couple of news stories even though it's a huge issue and it's about women's rights and it's about free speech and it's about all the things

we purport to care about yes yes and do you think because when in 79 when the mullahs ended up taking over yeah that all that all built momentum over the course of about a year through the death of protesters so what would happen there was a sort of in in iran the way it works is you actually have a memorial service. So I think you sort of bury the protesters, you bury the body quite quickly, but then you have a sort of memorial service for them

40 days after that died, right? And so, what happened in Iran back then was every 40 days they'd have a memorial service, people would be and they were essentially like protests but... It became ruling

protests as a result of that. And then people would be killed at those protests And then 40 days later, they turned up to memorialize the last group of things. They got bigger and bigger and bigger in every town across Iran. And you can sort of see that dynamic sort of starting to happen again. But the thing that's frustrating is how this is big. Like this is, you know, the Iranian protesters coming out in this size on this scale hasn't happened so far. They come out in large and large size.

This is the largest we've seen so far. And yet at the same time, like Reisi was allowed to speak at the United Nations. and, you know, he, Kisiana Manapur was going to interview him and then she didn't, she refused to because he was trying to force him to wear hijab. But, you know, Biden's still talking about the JCPOA, like Iran nuclear program deal and stuff like that.

So as far as the Iranian government's concerned, there doesn't seem to be much of a downside to just violently cracking down. To be fair, my phone, just as you were speaking, popped up with, here's why Iranian women are cutting their hair off and burning their hijab. Oh, that's very cool.

So clearly I'm being monitored. Yeah, absolutely. So as you should be. This is SBS news publishing it. So in fact, I can confirm that no one in the Australian media is paying any attention to this story at all. Your phone is like, I'll just do this for you. You're seeing it now on the front page.

It's really interesting. You're seeing it on the front page of most Western countries, finally, which is excellent, it's overdue. You're not singing on the front page of most Muslim countries and if you go on the forums where Muslim discussions happen which I'm on many of these forums

most of the debate is still about things like oh but hijab isn't bad and this isn't about Islamophobia and things that so like the priorities are still very different and that's why Iranians not Iran Iranians feel a bit abandoned by the rest of the world

maybe maybe what the government should do is force the Iranian version of the Little Mermaid Red Hijab That is the only way to get people to really care You're absolutely right

Yeah, exactly I mean, look Sammy I've heard what you had to say And it sounds like that sort of thing That would ordinarily interest me But I just can't I just can't I don't have any capacity

Here's what I do think I do think The Queen I'm sorry I just can't Everyone is I do think everyone is completely burnt out on everything. I really do feel that way.

Like, you know, the story broke recently about, I don't know, racism in footy. Oh, yeah, that's shocking. Yeah, horrible. Again, like, again, like, it's footy. Like, it's, I'm not surprised at all. But between that, so we've, like, do you notice, like, there's no major politicians or stream politicians of the front page of any newspapers?

Like, they've all disappeared. All the stories now are about just things that everyone just seems like, I can't keep up. I'm so fatigued. So I guess we're not picking and choosing which battles we want to fight and which ones we care about. I mean, my side, I just heard that story about Hawthorne and rather than being shocked, I was saying, oh, yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing we would expect. Exactly.

So you hear about a protest in Iran, you go, oh, yeah. If you hear about war in Ukraine, you go, oh, yeah, if you hear about floods in Pakistan, you go, oh, yeah, because we all just completely burnt out. And that's what I think the bad guy's plan is, burn us out with so much bad news. that when they hit us with the real bad news, we don't know what's happening. It's the deep state. That's all I'm saying.

Well, on that cheery note, why the fuck do we do a news podcast? Honestly, I'm at that same point. I do news weekly every week, and I do it only on Friday. So I do the writing and scripting every Friday. The episode comes out on Saturday. And I dread Fridays now,

because I'm just like, oh, I've been avoiding the news all week, and now I have to take a deep dive, and I feel like I'm going to be so mentally tired on Saturday. from this experience. Can we just rebrand from tomorrow as a gardening podcast? Yes.

The planter, the planter report or something. You're going to get sued by Costa, but other than that, it should be great. I'd love to see Costa be angry. That would be weird. Thank you, Sammy. Nice to have you back.

Is it though? I'm only sorry I had to learn about world events as a result of having you with us. Can you not do that next time? Fair enough. Look, anyway, I'm going to be too big in Ukraine to bother coming back on your little podcast. You're going to have to pay a lot of money

to book me once my Ukrainian what do we pay you in there? Zlotties or something? What are they? Yeah. Our gears from road microphone, we're part of the ACAS Creator Network. Catch you tomorrow. Bye. What's better than a well marbled ribby

sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribai you ordered without even leaving the kitty pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver.