Being a Doctor was Just Too Easy for Danish Ali
Syed Danish Ali, commonly known as Danish Ali, is a Pakistani actor, director, writer, producer, radio personality and the first Pakistani stand-up comedian to be welcomed to US department of state comedy tour. Combining rapidly changing, unassuming looks with irony, Ali gets audiences to let down their guards before hitting them with witty one-liners and substance which leaves them in fits.
Where Danish doesn’t remember himself being humorous as a child, he seems to get his act from a snooty, stupid childhood, often being put to place by his parents. I sense the concept of his famous skit super chittar originating close to home. If almost being arrested in France and getting beaten up by your parents for calling your neighbor a massi leads to success like this, we all would like boarding passes for the same adventure, please.
With an MBBS degree in his hand, Ali chose to enter the world of stand-up comedy as it was love at first site. Of course there were struggles along the way, one of them being a paycheck of just PKR 600.
Being the quirky guy that he is, Danish says ‘I want to officially go on record and salute all those mothers and fathers out there who don’t let their children become comedians and TV artists and models because they left the field wide open. I have an open market, literally there’s no one else and I’m loving it’.
Unlike most other parents, his parents questioned his choice to be a doctor and hesitated to send him to a private medical school. Fed up of medicine by the third year, the only reason Danish continued was to finish the degree. For the likes of Danish, driving around in a Lamborghini as a rich doctor sounded far too cliché and ordinary. After all, anyone can learn the digestive system and prescribe a couple of pills but not everyone takes on the challenge of putting smiles on people’s faces as a career.
He claims becoming a doctor would have been easy. ‘The comedian thing kind of came in because I want Pakistan on the map. I want nice things out of Pakistan so that one day someone could see a brown man and find him funny’, says Danish.
The deadly duo of Anwar Maqsood and Moin Akhtar came as an inspiration to Ali. Just like Moin was remarkable in his multidimensional acts, sporting different wardrobes, embodying countless accents and ridiculing evil characters of the society, Danish seems to be following the same ideology. For him, their writings and performances came as motivation to be completely originally himself.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not just comedy for this guy. His hopes of playing an action hero alongside Mahira Khan, the perfect weeping bahu, seem to be quite likely given the rise and progression of our film industry. He justifies his particular choice in Mahira claiming that she embodies the essence of the character she plays in hit drama serial Humsafar so well that bahus everywhere start weeping every time they hear Mahira.
“Now that she’s hanging out with Shahrukh Khan it might be a little tricky to get her”, he chuckled.
When you ask a comedian for advice, you don’t expect them to tell you to work hard and tell the truth. You expect them to tell you to have fun and not take life so seriously. This particular comedian also stresses you to go for entrepreneurship as we don’t have enough of it in Pakistan.
Where most of us think about getting a degree or a job, Ali plans to take the world by storm. The ultimate goal for him is to become a globally established, digital media star and stand-up comedian representing Pakistan. “Pakistan gave me a lot, it lets me be this comedian and people abroad wish to have my job. Now I want to give back, nobody really gets this chance”.
I think it’s safe to say that we can’t wait to see Danish frolicking around, teaching youngsters ‘How to be a chechora in 5 easy steps’ on the world stage.
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