Pakistani comedian Sami Shah has been featured more than once by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes. Almost a year ago Hamlet posted : Comedian Who Got His Start Performing Live in Second Life from Pakistan Gets His Own Show on the BBC.
More recently Sami has been talking to John Bailey of The Sydney Morning Herald : Sami Shah’s second life as a comedian. The reason Sami is talking to the Australian press is because he has been performing in Australia and will be performing, I MIGRANT & Other Stories by Sami Shah at The Cooper’s Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne April 5th – 17th as part of a comedy festival.
The reason “Second Life” is in the title of The Sydney Morning Herald article is of course because Sami used to perform in Second Life at a comedy club :
It was just people coming on and reading joke books, so I started performing there two or three times per week. The audience was all from America and England, so I’d wake up just to be there when they logged in, and in Pakistan that was six in the morning. I ended up earning a few hundred dollars doing comedy in Second Life in Pakistan for at least a year or two.
What this really exemplifies is how Virtual Worlds such as Second Life can give an artist worldwide reach. There’s no two hour drive to the venue involved and if you bomb in a virtual world, well, you have another advantage, you can reinvent yourself.
Continue reading “Comedian Sami Shah Exemplifies The Advantages Of Virtual World Reach”
