Taking on life with a laugh

Vietnamese-born comedian Anh Do was once asked by a friend which team he would back if Australia and Vietnam were playing each other in a football match. “Definitely Vietnam,” Do replied, without missing a beat, “because it’s the Aussie thing to back the underdog.”

It’s this disarming ability to make light of complex cultural issues that has helped earn Do such popular acclaim as a comedian.

On the subjects of his Vietnamese heritage, growing up in Australia and the bogan blokiness of Sydney’s western suburbs from where he hails, Do is amazingly fluent and freewheeling. His guileless grin is part of the promise of delight that is the talented funnyman’s gift to his adopted country.

His pleasure with the world is evident over the phone as Do talks about his new memoir, The Happiest Refugee.

“You know, I got this call from Russell Crowe about the book,” Do confides. “I thought it was one of my mates pulling my leg, but it turns out the Gladiator can get anyone’s phone number. He loved it. Said that he couldn’t put it down.”

When I echo these sentiments, Do is charmingly self-effacing. “I just wanted to put down my family’s story,” he says simply. And what a story it is.

Do’s family fled Vietnam on a crowded boat when he was two years old, escaping communist persecution for having fought alongside Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. The harrowing boat journey is only the first chapter in a childhood shadowed by poverty and his father’s drinking and violence.

Do writes of learning to hide from angry landlords banging on the door for rent, of pretending to have forgotten his textbooks rather than admit that his family couldn’t afford to buy them and, most disturbingly, of sleeping with a knife under his bed ready to defend his mother from his all-too-frequently drunken father.

“Yeah, it was hard to write that stuff,” he admits. “But I really just had to be honest.”

The Happiest Refugee is by no means a tale of woe.

Like any good comedian, Do makes good use of the comic flipside of tragedy, spinning out tales of eccentric relatives, VB-drinking grandmothers and the various capers and misadventures of a childhood dogged by never having quite enough. His tale of a horde of relatives turning up at his ritzy, North Shore engagement party with a giant suckling pig is just as hilarious as any of his stage performances.

Do’s unflagging optimism, so evident in our conversation, also flavours the pages of his memoir.

“My mum always had a smile on her face,” Do says when I ask about the source of his upbeat personality. “Here she was, speaking no English, on her own with three kids and barely able to put food on the table, and she never stopped grinning.”

It looks like her son has inherited her infectious grin and powerful optimism in the face of hardship — the perfect recipe for a comedian.

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Anh Do will be appearing at the University of WA on September 21 at 7pm. To book, visit www.extension.uwa.edu.au. On the same day from 12.30-1.30pm he will be signing copies of his book at Dymocks Hay Street. The Happiest Refugee is published by Allen & Unwin ($32.99)