Interview – Fear of a Brown Planet
After a bit of a hiatus, Fear of a Brown Planet are back and touring again. Aamer Rahman and Nazeem Hussain are primed and ready to share their scathing and hilarious observations of Australian culture. No subject is off-limits to this sharp-witted duo, as they tackle politics, racism and culture.
Heckler caught up with Nazeem and asked him the pressing questions.
It looks like you’re only performing together another four times this year – in Darwin, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Where else can people catch up with Aamer and Nazeem?
Outside of Fear of a Brown Planet we’re doing separate things. Aamer just did his solo show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, I’ve got my TV show coming up on SBS called Legally Brown, and we’ve been doing some stuff on Triple J. We’re just sort of doing stuff here and there.
What motivated you both to get into stand-up comedy?
Generally I always enjoyed making people laugh, and I was doing a lot of community work and stand-up comedy kind of evolved from that. You know, laughing was sort of a way to engage young people and have them listen to what you have to say.
I decided to enter raw comedy – comedy festival’s open mic competition – and Aamer did as well. We got through a few rounds and thought if I can do that I can put a one hour show together. So raw comedy was just five minute stand-up, and we decided arrogantly to jump from that to an hour straight away. And we did, and got lucky. It was fun, although I guess looking back quite a crazy thing to just decide to do very quickly.
A lot of comedians say that it’s hard to extend out from five minutes to an hour show just for lack of material. I guess you didn’t have that problem…
Lack of material was the least of our worries. We always had a lot of things to say, and we didn’t realise how long people spend honing and crafting their material, so I guess in that way it was a bit of a benefit. We just wrote our show really quickly. We spoke about the jokes to each other but we only really saw each other’s material on stage. We don’t really operate that way now, we spend a lot more time doing trial shows before we tour. But the aim of the game is still the same: if we can make each other laugh, then I think we’ve got the right material. That’s kind of the litmus test, making our friends laugh, making our family laugh. My sister and Aamer’s sister are our biggest supporters and also our biggest constructive critics, so they always provide pretty honest feedback: “This was bad, this was terrible”. Or they’ll walk out the room, sometimes!
Nazeem, I caught some of your Very Foreign Correspondent videos (from the cable show Balls of Steel), and you were just about endangering yourself with the Bathurst crowd…
[Laughs] We did have a security guard. And it was pretty frightening a couple of times. I could see the director wave and say “go in now!” And I’d look at the security guard who was 150 metres away and here’s this overweight old guy. He was an ex-sergeant from the police force, that’s how it was pitched to the crew. Ex-sergeant as in from the seventies or eighties. He was old. A couple of times I did just sort of have to run out of the scene. You know, people get aggro pretty quickly when there’s a brown guy telling them what to do. It got hairy a couple of times but it was a lot of fun. And I think you don’t really appreciate how dangerous some of these things are until once you’ve finished filming and people say, “You could have got punched there!”. And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I don’t really perceive danger at the time.” The new show I’m doing now, we do a fair bit of the camera stuff in a similar vein to Balls of Steel.
Doubtless you’re excited about the upcoming federal election. What do you think voters should know going into the ballot?
That it’s disappointing that both major parties are running on a campaign of fear and just selling ignorance about asylum seekers and that we shouldn’t just vote for the better of two evils. The voters should demand more. This election is a competition of who can be harsher and more inhumane towards the most vulnerable in society, it’s the most depressing election for me. I would suggest voters just demand more from politicians regarding the asylum seeker issue, because that just seems to be the main and only platform that we’re hearing about.
I think it was some of your material that was basically saying the same thing: why are you surprised that Labor turned out not to have a very good platform…[it was Aamer’s – Ed.]
Absolutely, it’s so interesting that voters 1) expect the Labor party to be massively progressive and 2) that they’re happy to vote for them simply because the Labor party is the better of two evils. It’s such pathetic logic, you wouldn’t go to a restaurant and eat a meal that had a piece of shit in it simply because it was better than a meal that has two pieces of shit on the plate. You know, you just wouldn’t eat it. I just don’t know why we accept that from politicians, from people that we elect and pay to run our country properly.
If Fear of a Brown Planet were a cocktail, how would you make it?
[Laughs] It would be non-alcoholic because we’re Muslim. And it would have a lot of chocolate in it because I’m a chocolaholic. And, uh, it would be probably be a molotov cocktail that we would hail at politicians. Metaphorically!
