WHEN I meet Sabahan comedian Achmed Rusli at the New Straits Times lobby, he’d just received a phone call.
“My shows have been cancelled,” he announces with a wry grin. The onslaught of the coronavirus has resulted in countless changes to daily life, with schools being closed, travel being upended and events being cancelled or postponed.
As the COVID-19 virus spreads, more and more people are being asked to stay home and practise “social distancing”. First it started with large stadiums, then theatres, then places with more than 500 people, then down to 100 people.
Achmed, also known by his popular moniker Mad Sabah, had been riding on a high with a series of shows including Crazy Poor Asian and Super Sabah this year, but things have come to a grinding halt for the comedian.
“Pasal Covid bah! (because of Covid!),” he remarks, shrugging his shoulders.
But he doesn’t look too perturbed. It is what it is, he says, adding sagely: “It’s better to stay safe anyway.” What’s there to panic? It’s not like he’s not been poor before, he quips, chuckling.
The self-deprecating humour is his trademark. For instance, last year, around the same time that the coronavirus invaded the human population, Achmed stood onstage and talked blithely about living in the interiors of Sabah and the struggles of Kampung Bugis in Kunak where he hails from.
In between jokes, he flashed a bewildered smile, as if he couldn’t believe what he just said. In this set, his nostalgic portrait of his kampung in the interiors of Sabah was genuinely moving, but his funniest material centred on the challenges of being poor.
Malay language stand-up comedy acts have been more of an anomaly in the mainly English-speaking genre, but comedians like Achmed have been surreptitiously whipping the rug off more established comedic acts and stealing the show. I remember wiping the tears off my eyes and wishing he’d been the headliner instead of the opening act.
Portraying a disgruntled Sabahan, Achmed mines humour from the perspective of being a fish out of water in metropolitan Kuala Lumpur and discovering how vastly different the standard of living is from his life in rural Sabah.
Think you Peninsular Malaysians have First World problems? Try Achmed’s Third World struggles back in his hometown instead.
“We have water issues, electricity issues and if you do finally manage to open a water pipe at our village, all that comes out are empty promises,” he deadpanned to uproarious laughter. Politicians are affronted of course. “They don’t like me very much,” he confesses, smiling.
“Comedians must have a social responsibility,” he continues, “We’re not just there to put smiles on people’s faces. There’s unemployment and the cost of living is higher than ever. With our jokes, we can make people reflect on what we’ve done in our country, what we’re doing and, I hope, what we should do.”
BOY FROM SABAH
The stories he tells onstage are real, he assures me. Kunak, he explains, is an 11-hour drive from Kota Kinabalu. “That’s only reaching the town itself. My village is another three-hour drive!” he says, grinning.
The drive to his village, he adds, isn’t for the faint-hearted. “On one side there are mountains, on the other side, a cliff. Right in front of you is a huge pothole,” he describes blithely, adding: “It’s as if you’re given a choice on how to die!”
His father worked in an oil plantation, where Achmed received his early schooling at a school set up by the employers as a welfare facility offered to workforce on plantations. However, the conditions under which this education scheme was implemented were far from satisfactory.
“The school was a joke,” he recounts, grinning. “The teacher would usually be a mechanic, and sometimes they’d get a Form Five boy to take over the class.”
It’s a story he weaves into his act, he confides, chuckling.
Realising that plantation workers’ children would usually become an educationally disadvantaged group, his father insisted that all five of his children enrol in a government school, a good distance away from their village.
They’d have to wake up as early as three in the morning to get ready and clamber at the back of a truck (“with seats nailed to the floor board of the truck!”), in order to take that three-hour drive to school every day.
“It was the best experience!” he says fondly, without any trace of sarcasm.
He wasn’t the brightest student, he insists, but his UPSR results got him the ticket to move out of his kampung into the boarding school in Kunak town itself.
“I realised then that life was so much bigger than the oil palm estate and jungles I grew up in,” he says, smiling.
For one, he remarks dryly, there were running water and electricity — something his village had never experienced for as long as he could remember.
He was active in sports, he recalls. Seeing my surprised face, he laughs heartily and pats his stomach, saying tongue-in-cheek: “I was a lot thinner back then…!”
He ran the 400 metres hurdle, and represented the school at the Asean School Games at Bishan stadium in Singapore.
Being an athlete paved a way for Achmed to pursue Sports Science at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). Upon graduation, he managed to land a job as a collection officer in Kuala Lumpur. “I collected on bad debts,” he explains, with a slight smile, adding simply: “It paid the bills.”
He stumbled upon comedy by chance and confidence, as he puts it.
“I got hooked on a comedy television show called Komediri. I think that was when I was like, 'I want to do that thing,'" Achmed says of the show. "I didn't know I could make it a job."
The thing about stand up, he explains, is you can joke about absolutely anything. Nothing is off limits. He loved the freedom of expression and thought he could try his hand at it. After all, he insists, he’s a funny guy.
“My friends think I’m hilarious!” Leaning forward, he continues earnestly: “I also remember seeing Harith Iskander on television, and thinking that I was so much funnier than him!”
BIRTH OF A COMEDIAN
Achmed googled “stand-up comedy” and found a few hits including Crackhouse Comedy, a dedicated comedy club founded by Rizal van Geyzel and Shankar Santhiram.
He called up Rizal, and the latter invited him to try out their open mic show, a platform dedicated to aspiring newbies who want to hone their skills, as well as regulars and professionals to refine their comedic craft. “So that’s exactly what I did,” he says, smiling.
Armed with confidence and not much else, he tanked his first show. “I didn’t know that I had to actually prepare. I winged it, followed the typical trope and joked about sex and porn, hoping to get some easy laughs,” he admits. It wasn’t funny at all, and no one laughed.
Failure is a gift, he insists. It’s hard to remember this when jokes are bombing in front of a room full of strangers, or, worse, friends and family. But stand-up, he says, more than most things, is trial by fire. The rejection stung, but he attributes his innate confidence for not giving up. “I still thought I was funny!” he insists.
He was also grateful for veteran comics who gave him sound advice after he tanked.
Comedian Rayza Mukmin told him bluntly: “You’re brave enough to talk, but your material isn’t good. Find something close to your heart and write!”
Taking the comedian’s advice to heart, Achmed scoured through YouTube videos and taught himself to write scripts.
“In stand-up, I realised no one could steal your jokes if you were being very personal about yourself — because it's your history,” he explains. “You might not like my history, but it's my story. The more I started doing that — focusing on what made me me — I realised that was really the style of comedy I loved doing the most.”
He continued to get as much stage time as he could. “I went everywhere!” he exclaims. He’d go to restaurants and try his act out while buskers took a break.
“I went to Ulu Langat, Kajang and all over Kuala Lumpur. When there were underground metal gigs, he’d request for some time to do his act.
“I’d ask: “Bang, saya nak buat stand-up, boleh? (Brother, can I do some stand-up comedy?) And they’d allow me,” he recounts gleefully.
RISING STAR
His big break finally arrived when Achmed decided to audition for Lawak Solo, an Astro reality talent show. His expectations were low, and he was only hoping to get discovered and be hired to do shows.
“I was already getting gigs by then, but the pay was low,” he reveals. To his surprise, Achmed got to the finals and won second place.
He supposes that stand-up was something rather unique to the audience, but he proudly proclaims that he was a hero of sorts to the folks back in his hometown. “I was just as popular as David Beckham!” he says, grinning.
His mother only found out about his participation around the 4th week. “Her neighbour alerted her and told her I was on television,” he says. His mother was shocked and watched him on TV in her neighbour’s house.
“The very next week there was Astro at my home in Kunak!” he shares, chuckling.
Why didn’t you tell your family? “I was too shy,” he replies candidly. His mother was proud, but pleaded with him not to reveal that they were poor. “She told me, ‘malulah mak!’ (I’ll be so embarrassed)” he recalls, laughing.
He quit his job as a collection officer and decided to plunge full time into comedy.
“By this time, I was hired as a talent and was also writing scripts for comedy shows,” he shares proudly.
As his career evolved, Achmed consciously put social and political topics at the heart of his act, believing that comedians have a role to play in articulating and challenging some of the most pressing issues of the day. His village, he says, is a classic example of poor governance and accountability of promises made but not kept.
“For Malaysians living in urban areas, access to clean water and electricity is expected. But for many in rural parts of the country, these are luxuries they don’t have,” he laments. He wanted to make a difference.
“Politics can leave you beleaguered, plagued, miserable,” he says. “It’s that maxim where they say, ‘Satire is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’. That’s why humour was important to me. It was a way to be useful for other people.”
In his work, Achmed filters the political realities of contemporary Malaysia — especially what he sees as overt injustices by government — through humour.
It took a toll on him. “It was my choice to stop working,” he shares. “I wasn’t in the mood to go out and try to be funny. I was dropped as a talent for being too controversial and travelling everywhere on gigs became tiring at one point. I needed the break because I wanted to take care of my wife.”
Achmed stresses that no matter how unique his stories and jokes might appear to others, he only has them because of the life he’s lived. And in order to acquire the experiences necessary to write such material, a person must experience things — like taking a break from the daily routine for a couple of years.
“I’m in this for the long haul until the very end. And because of that, you can’t work constantly. You can’t go non-stop. You need to take a break every so often so that your stories can change along with you,” he explains.
He took a break from the comedy scene to spend time with his wife who was pregnant with their first child. “We didn’t have much money, so I learnt how to make putu piring (a fragrant palm-sized round dessert made from rice flour, melted palm sugar and freshly grated coconut), and sold them right out of our home!” he says, laughing.
But like a siren’s call, comedy beckoned and Achmed decided to make a comeback (“… because I needed to pay for maternity bills!”). He was getting invitations for gigs and script writing. And before long, Achmed was right back in his element.
“I think of the fact that this is kind of my way of being welcomed back to the world that I had to leave for a bit, to make sure I was ready to come back. And the moment I started getting these opportunities, I thought, ‘This is a sign that you’re ready to go back to work.’”
Achmed thinks his role is the same as it has always been. “It’s to provide the balance to tragedy in the theatre that is art and life,” he says. “To rationalise trauma, one of the most effective coping methods humans have in this crazy world. It’s the best alternative to politics and its censored, sycophantic, dishonest nature. And… ” he continues, “it’s to help me pay bills and never ever get a real job. This is the most important one for me.”
What happens now that his shows are cancelled? He shrugs his shoulders. Then breaking into a wide grin, he replies: “Well, I can always go back to selling putu piring again!”