A star-studded comic line-up will grace the stage in Phnom Penh tonight as the city’s biggest international comedy night returns.
Canadian comic Allyson Smith and Britain’s Imran Yusuf will perform at Pontoon as Comedy Club Cambodia, which hosts comics from around the world, comes back from a summer hiatus.
Yusuf is renowned in the UK for his fast-paced wisecracking, often about being a Muslim in Britain.
Smith, who counts Sarah Millican and Joan Rivers among her influences, said she was excited to bring her brand of personal, observational comedy to Asia for the first time.
“I love Cambodia. It’s wonderful,” she said, adding that the crowds in Asia were more welcoming to a female comic than some of the male-dominated comedy clubs in Britain. “It is way more 50-50 here. In Asia people are just learning about comedy clubs, so there aren’t those associations.
“Sometimes it can be intimidating at certain clubs in England. They just look at you like, ‘What are you doing here? We want to see a bloke.’ ”
But Smith says she has had to adapt her material in light of cultural differences.
“I told a joke about Brownie Guides in Singapore, which fell flat as they were all asking: ‘What is that?’
“The jokes that work everywhere are the ones about family and relationship problems.”
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