All around the globe, Irish comedy is having a moment. Baz Ashmawy, writer and star of Irish sitcom Faithless, has a pretty good idea why.
“It's just a sense of humoor that translates well to other places. There's a certain type of comedy that Irish people have, there’s a bit of darkness to it and a little bit of a warmth to it. It's very self deprecating humour, it's not vicious towards someone else. We can laugh at ourselves.”
Born in Libya, the Irish-Egyptian Ashmawy has been making audiences in Ireland and around the world laugh for years as a presenter on radio and television, most notably with his International Emmy winning series 50 Ways to Kill Your Mammy. Taking his mother on a string of potentially death-defying adventures made him a household name, but for the former theatre actor there was one big drawback; being famous as a host killed off his acting career.
“No-one would ever cast me,” he says. “They’d just go ‘It’s Baz, everyone knows Baz’.”
His solution? He’d write his own series to star in.
“I never went out to write a sitcom, I went out to write a kind of mini drama,” he says. “But I knew I wanted it to be funny. I always like to play with those gears of, you know, ‘we won't laugh about this now, but we will later’. I've had a lot of those moments in my life.”
Sam (Baz Ashmawy) with Nancy (Carmen Rose Youssef) in 'Faithless'. Credit: Finn Boylan / Grand Pictures
Faithless is the story of Sam, a suddenly single father struggling to raise his three daughters after his wife dies in a tragic accident (it involves an ice cream van) in the series’ opening scene. It’s a moment that goes from startling to hilarious in rapid succession – a mood shift that becomes something of a speciality as the series progresses.
“That opening scene was always so important. That was the first thing I wrote, and the first thing I imagined. And it was so important because it was a complete shift of gears. You're watching and you think this is some kind of slightly mental comedy, and then she gets killed. And then him doing a terrible job of delivering the news to the kids. It's all this spiral of cringy, terrible, should I laugh kind of comedy.”
Despite Ashmawy’s industry status, a comedy exploring grief and multicultural Ireland with a television presenter in the lead turned out to be a bit of a tough sell, taking years to go from script to screen. At the time it was frustrating, but now he sees that delay as something of a blessing.
“I remember going to [companies in] the UK in the very early days and they wanted to take us but they wanted to change the main protagonist to a woman. Like ‘well, hold on. I'll turn into Mrs. Doubtfire for it then will I?’ I wrote it to be in it, so I ended up holding on to the script. I'm glad I did because I wasn’t ready then, it took five years to learn how to write and rewrite and not be sensitive about the material and know when to let something go.”
Looking back now, he’s surprised at how much he came to enjoy the writing process. “That was never my main focus. My main focus was to get back and act, but I fell in love with the writing and world building and creating. It was brilliant, and to see it come to life is amazing. It's great.”
Help from his extended family can make life complicated for single dad Sam (Baz Ashmawy). Credit: Grand Pictures / Finn Boylan
Even after half a decade working on the script and spending time with Sam, when it came time to say his lines in front of the cameras there were still a few surprises waiting for him.
“Halfway through I was like ‘I’m the straight man! I wrote myself the straight man parts! Why did I do that?’ I think subconsciously I’m known for being witty or a presenter type, and I didn’t want to be that. Sam is a guy whose wife has just died and he’s overwhelmed with grief and stress, so he’s quite different to me as a person.”
Over the course of six episodes, Faithless effortlessly moves between a heartfelt look at grief and whip-smart comedy – and when a bit of slapstick can fit in there, Sam’s not afraid to tip a garbage bin over his own head. Ashmawy’s a fan of film and television that blurs the lines between drama and comedy (“I think one of my favourite movies ever is Chopper,” he says. “I’m a 49-year-old man and I quote him all the time”), believing that shifting between the two helps pull the audience in. The comedy makes the drama stronger, and vice versa.
“I one hundred percent believe that if you can make someone open up with laughter, it is exactly the right moment to hit them with poignancy,” he says. “And then, as that poignancy is just getting slightly too icky, you go back to laughter again. It's that constant gear change, that's where you grab people.”
Beyond the laughs, Faithless is a look at the kind of Irish family not usually shown on television. Culturally diverse, living in modern suburbia: “These are not traditional Irish people, but this is an Irish family,” he says.
“It’s strange being mixed race,” he says. “No matter where you live, you're kind of torn by identity. You live somewhere and you understand the culture, yet you have this other culture and you're kind of pulled both ways. Identity and belonging and all that, they're all big kind of buzzwords but they're also real things. And that's where I wanted to go.”
Faithless is streaming now at SBS On Demand.
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Faithless
