Dilruk Jayasinha &
all, but if I had all the money in the world, what
would I do?’ I worked backwards, thinking that
if money wasn’t my motivator, what would I do.
And standup popped in my head straight away
and not long after that, I did my first gig and
went ‘yep, that’s it, this is what I want to do’.”
Jayemanne, who was born and raised in
Australia, admits that his material has been
evolving in the four years that he has been
performing comedy. “When I started, it was
definitely just one-liners. I had no real writing
process, not to say that I do now, but I kinda
just came up with jokes, whatever came to me.
I did a lot of one-liners and wordplay. If I saw a
sign, I taught myself how to interpret it in a kind
of twisted way and made jokes out of that”.
Jayasinha confesses that he had wanted to try
his hand at standup comedy ever since he was a
kid; “I saw Eddie Murphy’s ‘Delirious’ when I was
eleven and I had to secretly watch it without my
mum finding out”, he laughs. “I was memorising
all the lines. But because I grew up in Sri Lanka,
there was no comedy scene as such, that’s was
really all I knew of standup; ‘Delirious’ and ‘Raw’,
his second special, and I kind of put it aside”.
Fast forward to when Jayasinha was 25 years
old and living in Australia, “I was doing this
accounting job that I hated and I got fired from
it, because I was really feeling miserable by
the end of it, and I was so happy that it actually
finished. I thought to myself ‘well I did that for
the money and that didn’t make me happy at
With time and experience, the comedian has
started to talk more about his life and personal
experiences, which he admits is a different
beast to writing one-liners. “The puns are
challenging to stretch out over an hour-long
show