Comedian Akmal Saleh talks Launceston and free time

It’s just that he has so much more time to do it.

Speaking to The Examiner ahead of his show in Launceston next month, the much-loved Egypt-born comic spoke of the mixed blessing that is life as a comedian. 

“You’ve got to find things to do… I only work like an hour ten a night so that’s all I have to do, the rest of the time is mine,” he said. 

“It’s one of the privileges of being a comedian but you’ve got to find things to do to fill in that time - it’s easy to let the day drift and the hours go.

“They say comedians are depressed people - they’re depressed because they’ve got too much time on their hands, they’ve got time to philosophise and think about how bad the world is.” 

More than a year since featuring alongside Shane Warne in I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, the 52-year-old is nearing the home straight of his new show Transparent’s national tour.

Like most Akmal tours, every show is different from the next. 

“I change it around a lot, probably a lot more than other comedians, so I keep it really loose.

“That’s just the style I’ve developed over the years, so sometimes I’ll have a set of jokes I’ll have ready to do, new bits or whatever and I get out and the vibe’s different and someone yells something out and I take it in a different direction.

“On a good night you don’t even need to touch your act, you can just go off on tangents and everything’s clicking and working, then other nights you get on and you’re struggling and you have to pull out the ‘A material’.” 

The Launceston show – August 11 at Country Club Tasmania – will see Akmal return to the town where he studied about 30 years ago.

“Some of the happiest time of my life were Launceston, I was really young and I had a lot of energy.

“I was sharing a house with a member of a band who was really big in Tasmania called The Fish John West Reject.

“That was my first experience of being on stage, going and opening for them and travelling around Tasmania doing that with those guys.” 

Tickets to Transparent are $46.90 from Tixtas. 

Doors open at 7.30pm.