During most of his classes at school, Khaled Khalafalla was constructing jokes in his head. “In maths, I would daydream about what jokes I would say at recess,” he recalls. “And at recess and lunchtime, I would go out and say all the things I rehearsed in my head and see if I get a laugh, and then go back and try again. I would do that every day.”
Khalafalla listened obsessively to Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy in his youth, but soon realised that he didn’t want to merely recite the lines of his favourite comics. Besides Rock and Murphy, it was comedians like Louis C.K., Hannibal Buress and Patrice O’Neal who influenced not only his comedy, but his rhythm on stage.
“When the opportunity came to do stand-up, I heard about RAW Comedy,” he says. “The first time I did it, I didn’t even get past the first round. And then two years later, I got through to the grand final. I think it was a good lesson that you’re not naturally funny if you think you are – it’s still a different language that you have to learn. At every point, I keep going ‘am I a comedian?’ I do a good set and I go ‘yeah, I’m a comedian’ and then I might do a bad set and I go, ‘am I a comedian? I don’t even know’. I have to keep learning to figure out whether I’m a comedian or not. I think that’s going to be a question on my head until I’m 40 years in the game.
Khalafalla was born in Saudi Arabia to Egyptian parents and lived there for about seven years. “I was young, so I didn’t have the mental capacity to even understand the politics or the gender roles or finance or jobs or education,” he considers. “I just remember the sun, the beach and my house. I grew up in Egyptian households speaking Egyptian Arabic and I would go outside and meet people who are speaking the Saudi Arabian dialect, which is still Arabic, but I didn’t understand it at all. So I was basically a foreigner in a country I was born in.”
His family then moved to New Zealand before moving to Australia. “A lot of my formative adolescent years, building who I was and my character, happened in New Zealand,” says Khalafalla. “I lived in Townsville for a year, went down to Bendigo and then to Melbourne. I went from Shari’ah capital of the world to rural farming towns in New Zealand to rural areas in North Queensland and then to Melbourne.”
Khalafalla is one of the country’s most exciting new comics, and runs a great comedy room in Springvale called Shisha Comedy. Although he’s addressed some racial and social issues in his comedy, it’s not his aim. “I just care about being funny,” he affirms. “I do something and people go: ‘oh, I like the way he’s breaking down stereotypes and really breaking down that social barrier and bridging the majority and the fringes’ – that’s not my aim, even remotely. The only person I can represent is myself. The moment I start going, ‘I’m trying to have a message’ then I become a political comic, and then it all goes downhill from there.”
The Melbourne comedian’s Muslim faith informs him only on a subconscious level when it comes to his comedy. “I’m not thinking about how to establish myself as a Muslim comic,” he says. “My religion and race have very little to do with what I’m saying in my next show. My next show is going to be about feminism and gay marriage. I’ve deliberately picked topics that are quite broad and that people will have opinions about for the majority of my lifetime and my career.”
BY CHRISTINE LAN
