Hussain calls our bluff, tests our limits

IT'S the final episode of this often very funny weekly comedy series that has made a bit of a star out of the emerging Nazeem Hussain.

Nazeem Hussain

IT'S the final episode of this often very funny weekly comedy series that has made a bit of a star out of the emerging Nazeem Hussain, a comic with a brave way about him but who exhibits as much charm as combativeness.

The series title gives the game away. Hussain, a Muslim whose parents immigrated to Australia from Sri Lanka, uses his developing comic skills to engage with social and racial divisions in this country. He doesn't crack biting jokes only about his own community but about the nation's white majority as well.

He's adept at a kind of bluff and counter-bluff, often teasingly comically aggressive, which affords a reminder that much laughter is hypercritical or habitual or deferential or just polite.

With Hussain we often laugh at jokes that aren't all that funny just to escape the mockery in them, or perhaps to show goodwill. He knows how to get us laughing at our own profoundly held assumptions.

Armed with a captivating grin and a roving eye, his patter crisp and snappy, he performs his unique brand of stand-up comedy in front of a studio audience, interspersed with pre-recorded character sketches and hidden camera stunts.

He also happens to be a tax consultant, sits on the board of the Islamic Council of Victoria and is an acknowledged spokesman for his community, with obviously no compunction to moderate his often-lacerating humour. He's still a bit rough around the edges and it's his greatest strength in some ways.

Tonight his dodgy TV mystic Imran Farook performs deep soul makeovers in Spirit Time, and in Flip World, where white Australians are the minority, there is a security incident at the airport. He also hits the streets in a social experiment to test public generosity for some controversial "causes".

Legally Brown
SBS One, 9.30pm