Nathan Asani’s popular Sydney-centric meme page can feel like it is staring into the city’s soul – and laughing at it.
“Monkey Boy” has gained a cult following for its often biting comedy about Sydney’s tribalism, subcultures and rivalries.
But Asani says his page tells a broader narrative about life in the city, and highlights the need for “Sydney stories”.
“All great cities have narratives and jokes around them, and I am very much a product of those narratives of Sydney,” he says, demonstrating the fact as he sips a latte at a hip inner-city cafe, a deeply Sydney experience.
Asani’s page, which has more than 43,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 23,000 on TikTok, began in 2023 with a series of maps offering “guides” to parts of Sydney including the inner west, eastern suburbs and greater west.
The maps summarised areas with one word: Burwood was “Bubble Tea”; Randwick was dubbed the “Marrickville of the East”.
Nathan Asani, aka Monkey Boy, said his meme page focuses on telling Sydney stories.Credit: Wolter Peeters
His posts soon went viral due to their insight into the inner workings of various Sydney subcultures and rivalries, and the city’s ethnic make-up.
They also struck a unique tone, avoiding the condescension that can come with postcode jokes and instead embracing – almost celebrating – the oddities of Sydney life.
Asani has maintained such a tone as his content has proliferated. His page has identified various “Sydney creatures” through classifications and attributes such as the “amazing” eyebrows on a Lebanese man who grew up in “the area” – a local term for western Sydney – in the early 2000s, or the fact that an “old lady from the upper north shore” makes the perfect cup of tea. Last year he published a “mullet map” which showed how the hairstyle differed on heads across the city.
To Asani, the hyper-local nature of his jokes and celebratory undertones of his page are part of a worldview best summarised as “getting people to care about Sydney”.
“My memes are short glimpses and moments in Sydney, and just showing how colourful Sydney is because it has a reputation as being a bit soulless or cultureless, especially compared to Melbourne,” he says.
“People talk about Sydney as being very corporate or being very commercial, and it is really important to me to say, no, actually, Sydney does have a soul.”
Asani says that some people are attracted to the page out of a curiosity about different parts of Sydney, with clichés in some areas unknown elsewhere.
“I want people in the northern beaches to be curious about people in western Sydney, and vice versa,” he says. “I think there are stories and jokes they don’t know about each other.”
The Monkey Boy page works hard to deliver, with Asani at times posting many times a week. As well as geographically focused content, he makes memes relating to current affairs; elections, union negotiations with the state government, the weather and the Easter Show have all previously featured.
Beyond giving his comedic and storytelling instincts an outlet, Asani is motivated by a desire to provide local content.
In the absence of TV shows and movies set in and about Sydney, Asani believes a page like his can fill a gap, sharing the many stories the city has to tell.
“I think there is a need for local content,” he says. “People love it, and the internet has made it more accessible.
“TV channels and media companies don’t find it feasible to make shows only about Sydney, but I can. I have no overheads; I can tell the stories I want to.”
With such a passionate belief in telling Australian stories, Asani sees himself as a “kind of nationalist”.
“I think we need to uplift Australian creators. You need to choose Aussie artists over the foreign artists. I definitely, definitely have always viewed myself as someone that champions Australian stories.”
But while he wants to celebrate Sydney, Asani is also concerned by the direction the city is taking.
To Asani, young people being priced out of housing presents an existential problem to the city and its culture by impeding social movement for young people, restricting them to areas they can afford, and diluting the cultural power that comes with economic freedom.
He worries that, without a solution, Sydney could become “like Dubai”, where “working-class people are in the shadows, and the city is a bit soulless”.
“Even rich people lose out,” he says. “Who do they think start cool cafes or do any of the cool stuff in the city? It is always working-class people. They bring the culture, and it will be a real shame if they are priced out.”
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