'You Can’t Come Back With Old Shit'

"I’ve been very blessed. I worked on film with my friends – we were a troupe of three guys who worked really well together, and that was a lot of fun, it was so different to stand-up. The radio and TV appearances, I’ve kind of just been offered, and I do it mainly because it lifts my profile.” Indeed, Saleh has tried his hand at a lot of performing arts forms over the years, but nothing quite compares to the feeling of being solo on stage, making people laugh. “Basically when I go out on the road I have full houses, and that to me is the most important thing. That’s the thing I love the most and the thing I feel most competent doing. Everything else feeds that live performance, when you go out to a theatre or a club and you have people who know you from television, or radio or whatever.”

He’ll be touring the country doing stand-up – but that’s not to say you shouldn’t expect fresh material. “I’m doing a circus performance this year, The Cirque du Saleh. Nah, it’s just going to be my stand-up, I wish I could tell you more about it. It’s just me on stage with a microphone, it can’t get more basic than that. You can’t come back with old shit, though. You have to be relentless.”

Saleh has an Egyptian background, and immigrated to Australia with his family at the age of 11. Having to adapt to a new culture is what has made his stand-up what it is today, his disillusionment with religion and the modern world his main topics. He jokes that his parents don’t really get it. “No matter how much success I’ve had – I come from an Egyptian culture – they don’t really appreciate stand-up comedy; it’s not a big deal. No matter how much success I’ve had I’ve never been able to make my family proud, they’re deeply ashamed of me and never talk about me. I’ll be like, ‘Look mum, I’m on TV, mum!’ and she’ll just turn around and go, ‘Very good, but if you kept your job and Telstra you could have been manager by now.’”

When he initially started his career as a comedian in Australia, Saleh was “was one of, if not the only ethnic stand-up comedians, as far as I know.” He faced challenges back then, in that he “had to do all these shitty nightclubs and comedy stores with bucks nights who were mostly white people from the shire,” and with the ‘war on terror’ so blatant across all media channels, it’s a challenge now. As a comic, he can see the bright side of it all. “It’s good for me, it’s bad for everyone else. Bring on ISIS, you know? It means I have more material. At the moment, Abbott’s great for comedians, bad for the country. All the comedians are praying he stays there because he’s such a gift. Every time a comic picks up the paper they have another five minutes.”