By Jessica Taurins.
Anisa Nandaula is like your best friend. She’s got a smile that lights up the room, a warm personality, and she’ll say the most messed up sh-t you’ve ever heard.
Thus is the premise of her MICF 2025 show – You Can’t Say That.
As a black woman raised in Uganda and transplanted to overwhelmingly white Rockhampton, Queensland, Nandaula has conflicting opinions on everything, and she’s gonna tell you about them whether you want to hear them or not.
Nandaula rose to fame as a TikTok comedian with her short form cracks about cultural differences, so it isn’t surprising to see her now taking to the stage. Less publicly, she’s a practiced performance poet and storyteller, which wonderfully rounds out her skillset of chatterboxing to the audience.
You Can’t Say That is a fairly standard blend of stand-up and audience interaction, with Nandaula’s cutting humour coming through in every moment. Audience interaction can be hard, but Nandaula picks ’em pretty well, peering through the crowd and calling out to her various groups – black people, people who think Asians are hot, people dating autistic engineers. Then she skilfully weaves people’s answers into her stories, hearing out even the most long-winded audience members before she plunges back into her own tales.
For those among us who are PC to a fault, Nandaula’s set can be challenging. She says whatever she wants, whenever she wants, dancing round the stage while she chats racism, mental health, and everything else. But unlike some other comedians, Nandaula’s history and her own blend of black and white culture allows her the freedom to joke about hard topics because she’s lived them.
Yeah, her mum smacked her, but what Ugandan mum in the early 2000s wasn’t smacking her kids? Nandaula will get her revenge when her mum is in a care home before the ripe age of 50.
Nandaula lets us know at the end of her set that she’s been performing every night for the past month, which is an astounding number of shows. Still, You Can’t Say That is a little disjointed, sometimes meandering from one story to another without much connection. However, in the age of twelve second attention spans and doom scrolling until your eyes fall out, it could be an intentional choice to give the audience a new thing to think about every few minutes.
Nandaula is creative and sharp, drawing on a wide range of experiences designed to delight and scare her audience. Her stories are relatable and charming, and her openness to talk about anything in her life – whether it’s true or not – makes her an incredibly fun watch.
