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What Osama bin Laden and Batman have in common: millionaires who live in a cave and fight a battle that has nothing to do with them

* City Nazim Mustafa Kamal is digging for long-lost treasure
* Why suicide bombers leave their heads behind before going to heaven

By Urooj Zia

KARACHI: His legs are so hairy, it looks like he’s wearing pants even when he’s not, stand-up comedian Sami Shah told his audience Sunday night at the PACC. Other portions of his anatomy are relatively hair-free, though, “it’s just the area waist down that is problematic.” Also, ghosts are sneaky, the president of Pakistan should be kidney-punched, and city nazim Mustafa Kamal is actually digging for long-lost treasure throughout Karachi.

Sami Shah “brought the funny back” (and the house down in the process) in a show that was said to be a tribute to Karachi, “to help it get back on its feet yet again.”

Starting off with the Pakistan advertising agency, all the way to local and international politics, culture, mentally-disabled people (“retards!”), and children who have been molested, nothing and no one was spared Sami’s irreverent, incongruous rants.

Fair people have awesome lives, or so our advertising agencies would have us believe. Also, going by local advertisements, fairness creams are actually miracle cures for severe facial deformities and burn injuries, Sami would have everyone know. He then proceeded to describe an absolutely traumatic experience he had getting a facial (“just once in my life, I won’t lie to you!”), when the gates of hell were opened up next to his face by a reincarnation of Lara Croft, the “action archaeologist” who went on to remove his prehistoric blackheads.

Sami has two theories about all the digging going on around Karachi, and he leaves it up to his audience to decide which one is more plausible. The first theory involves an intricate plot, with a heroine and a hairy traffic policeman. The two proceed to destroy the treasure that Mustafa Kamal is looking for. The map for this treasure, incidentally, is imprinted on an ahem, member of male anatomy, from the colonial era. Theory number 2: Mustafa Kamal has been laying down sewerage pipes for the past three years. “Now you tell me which one is more plausible!”

The funny man also had a theory about why mullahs hate women. “All members of the MMA are the ugly results of inbreeding between trolls and gremlins. They hate women because they are constantly rejected by them,” Sami offered, adding however, that he was not calling for women to sleep with members of the MMA, “even though this would be an interesting NGO charter.”

“You see, this is why you have suicide bombers! They blow themselves up thinking ‘heck, if I can’t get any here, I might as well try for some up there!’ And THIS is why they always leave their heads behind, because that ugly head is what held them back here too,” Sami said.

He also had something to say about the placement of pictures in President General Pervez Musharraf’s autobiography (In the Line of Fire): “There’s a picture with the caption ‘me and my wife,’ the next picture’s titled ‘me and my children,’ and then in a corner you have ‘the suicide bomber’s head.’ Ohkay!”

Comic book geeks can rejoice, Sami prophesied, for the world is starting to mould itself around action comics, and “things we’re interested in (comic books, that is) won’t seem so boring anymore.”

Jamia Hafsa was equated to X-Men (both have men who run a school to train people, etc), Osama bin Laden is akin to Batman (both men are millionaires, live in caves, and fight battles which have nothing to do with themselves personally). “You see, the covers of Herald and Newsline might as well be the covers of action comics,” Sami proclaimed.

Almost everyone in Pakistan was molested in childhood, according to Sami, and every molested child is scarred for life. “When I was 13, I went to a shop to buy graph paper,” he related. When he was about to pay the shopkeeper, the latter came forward and ‘grabbed’ him. “I was shocked! Because no one had ever told me that this is how you pay for things you buy. Even now, I go to shops, pick up things, and pay thus,” Sami said, thrusting his hips forward to demonstrate. “I have no shame, do I?”

He told everyone the story of how he once got caught in a seven-hour traffic jam in Karachi, and contemplated kidney punching the President. Communities emerged, and Sami stood around with rickshaw-, taxi-, and bus-drivers, “laughing, chatting, sharing cigarettes, contemplating who to cut up and eat first.”

He mixed new comic material with old stuff, such as the anecdote about how dancing women at Mehndis hate each other. One thing he was very right about, though. People who come up to people who wear glasses, ask them to take their glasses off, and then ask how many fingers they’re holding up “are b(*&^%!”

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