It's a Sunday night crowd of couples, groups of friends, families with younger kids in tow, and even the older "aunties" and mums that are sometimes the punchlines of comedian Nazeem Hussain's jokes.He's slinging gags about everybody: brown people, black people, white people — and every single one of them, including me, is alternately laughing in horror or sheer delight.I've spent weeks studying Nazeem's comedy and days with him for a new episode of Creative Types, but as this risky and outrageous comedy swings all around me, I still can't figure how he does it."I don't really have another way," Nazeem tells me after the show That night in the Brisbane Powerhouse, the audience might have had their hands over their mouths in shock — but they were helplessly laughing.I ask him about this, nonplussed: how can jokes about bombing, about human shields, about death and trauma in the Middle East be … funny?For Nazeem, the only logical response to the horror he was feeling as he watched the devastation unfold in Gaza was comedy."It was such a heavy feeling," he recalls of the last 12 months, "and the only way I know how to process stuff is on stage"."I wasn't really sure if it was a good or bad thing to do, but what I found pretty quickly was that audiences were feeling as heavy. "You're feeling horrible — but why? So, let's release some tension."One of Nazeem's most celebrated routines is his "12-and-a-half minutes of jokes about Israel" in a 2025 recorded special