Akmal Saleh is clearly comic who knows what he’s doing: a powerhouse of zippy entertainment, he has the audience eating out of his hand from the moment he steps on stage. ‘Don’t take life too seriously,’ he often says, and that pretty much sums up his entire sprightly approach.

Though resident in Australia since a child, Saleh was born in Egypt; a heritage that gives him licence to do all the terrorist-based material he likes. And when he leaps around banging his forehead in an only slightly exaggerated impersonation of an extremist’s gleeful celebration, it elicits squeals of delight from some quarters.

But he wears his ethnicity lightly. Although he will forever be known as ‘the Egyptian comic’, he’s really a comic who just happens to have been born in Cairo. The lion’s share of his material is much more mainstream and generic, to such an extent that it’s actually disappointing how workaday it actually is.

Among wider routines, for instance, he gets laughs out of dodgy Indian accents, or the hardly revelatory fact that train announcements can sometimes be unintelligible. A couple of recycled pub gags make an appearance, too.

By no means all his material is as bland as this, but essentially Akmal’s set is much more about the powerful performance and his charming presence than it is about the material.

He plays the likeable personality angle up even further by inviting questions from the floor, and while the responses never generate anything like comedy gold, they cement his easy rapport with the audience. It’s a style that surely serves him well on comedy nights around the country – and there’s no doubt he’d make a top-notch compere – even if the content does feel a little insubstantial for a full-length show.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2005