It never rains for Nazeem Hussain – it pours. The 31-year-old is about to wrap filming on a brand-new sketch show, he’s expecting his first child at the end of next month and he’s gearing up for some of his biggest-ever shows in both Sydney and Melbourne for their respective Comedy Festivals. Needless to say, Hussain has a lot to reflect on.
“My shows tend to be a reflection on the year that just passed – it’s like a diary,” he says. “Stuff will happen to me, and I honestly won’t even have time to process it. It’s weird, I can’t really write my shows in advance. I just kind of have to wait for life to happen.”
Even with TV work ranging from Bill Nye Saves the Universe to Hughesy, We Have a Problem, Hussain always finds his way back to stand-up. By maintaining a connection, he finds himself easily able to fill up an hour come festival time. “I like to keep active with performing – I’ll try and get up on stage a few times a month,” he says. “There’s plenty of awesome rooms around the country that are always operating outside of festival season. It helps me to work through my stories – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Really, any excuse to talk some shit, I’ll take.”
Hussain is the first to admit there is an element of l’esprit de l’escalier in his material – i.e. thinking of the right thing to say long after the opportunity has passed to say it. With No Pain, however, he’s done his best to try and keep it real.
“In the moment, a lot of the time, you can be really stuck for words,” he says. “It can be fun to have the last word, but you can’t always be the guy who wins in your stories. The humour can definitely come from you coming off as the idiot. Whatever the case, sometimes the best way to figure out how you feel about a certain scenario can be by going through it as a part of your act.”
Originally rising to prominence as one half of Fear of a Brown Planet – alongside Aamer Rahman – Hussain has spent the last decade, and then some, essentially growing up on stage. He’s proud of how far he’s come, as well as of his current standing as a theatre-filling act.
“When you’re starting out, you’re under this impression that you have so much to say and that you’ve got all of these great jokes and observations to make,” he says. “I look back on my earliest days of stand-up, and I think ‘Why did anyone think it was a good idea to put me on stage?’ I was just a kid. Maybe it’s just maturity in general, but you start to get a more natural sense of what’s funny for you as you get older. It sounds wanky, but all I’m doing is just trying to get a laugh.”
