“You might know Michael Shafar from his debut special ‘(A)LIVE’ on Amazon Prime, his YouTube special ‘Alright, Next Joke’ or perhaps you’re one of the 80+ million people who have seen his videos online,” the Melbourne stand-up comedian’s flyer proclaims.
I don’t and I haven’t, and arrived at his jam-packed debut Edinburgh solo show a Shafar debutant myself. It was in the Laughing Horse’s loft and it was immediately clear that Shafar, a newly married Jewish testicular cancer survivor, is not one to shy away from life’s taboos. Cue, Jew-in-the-attic jokes when a beeping Mercedes interrupted his act from the pebbled road below, prompting Shafar to jape, in reference to the German carmaker: “Getting beeped at by a Mercedes is quite triggering for me.”
As the kerfuffle continued, threatening to interrupt his smoothly constructed act, he coolly worked it into his material. “I’ve never been heckled by a car horn so much … By the way, I’ve only been here three days; does this happen all the time?” he asked, as the audience roared with laughter.
Now living in Islington, in north London, Shafar, 32, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, has a disarmingly relaxed approach and an intelligent sense of humour with a wildly inventive, darkly comic imagination.
He is as comfortable squeezing a joke out of a non-practising paedophile as he is out of his unwittingly “racist” grandmother’s generation, Parkinson’s disease sufferers or Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy novel ‘Alice in Wonderland’. “She gets accused of a crime she did not commit. She shouldn’t have been white. It should have been ‘Letitia in Detroit’,” he quipped.
His brush with death gives the slender 6ft 1in comedian a licence to go where others might be wary of treading. His whimsical riff on the loss of his testicle – featuring a possible donor one from his dad and his angsty mum worrying about the effect of skinny jeans – is surely unique in the stand-up era. “I told a friend and he said: ‘So when you have sex, your penis must look like an exclamation mark.’ So I said, ‘No, I’ve got a curve. It’s more like a question mark.”
Free-flowing and irreverent, his humour is imbued with a warmth and approachability that makes it relatable to more than just the millennials who made up a goodly proportion of his audience. By the time he ended his set with a self-deprecating itchy-bum joke – another niche area – Shafar had them in the palm of his (hopefully clean) hand.
Michael Shafar: Well Worth the Chemo
Laughing Horse @ The Counting House
