At just over six feet tall and around 130 kilos, Melbourne-via-Sri Lanka comedian Dilruk Jayasinha is not one to shy away from talking about his size – he even once titled a festival show with the punningly brilliant nameKind Of A Big Dil.

So when the former accountant is ribbed and roasted about his love of ribs and roasts – particularly by other comics – he knows exactly how to take it in his stride.

“There’s a running joke where I get called a ‘disgusting fat fuck’,” Jayasinha explains.“What a lot of people don’t remember or know, though, is that I was the one that came up with that phrase. I originally used it on [fellow comedian] Ben Lomas, and it started going back and forth between the two of us before it caught on with others. I’ve got to be honest, it’s pretty amazing to see your own creation flying about. People have had a lot of fun with it. There was even one random guy that bought the domain name disgustingfatfuck.com, and set it up so that when you [went] to that page, it directly [linked] to my Twitter account.

“There may come a saturation point at some stage, but even then I think that comedians are so blessed to be able to take what would normally be embarrassing things about themselves and just own them as comedians.”

Jayasinha has been performing stand-up comedy since 2010, honing his skills across dozens of open mic nights in Melbourne, where he has lived as long as he has been in Australia. He gained a considerable spike in fans thanks to his multiple appearances on Australian comedy podcast The Little Dum Dum Club, and even picked up the gong for Comic of the Year from Spleen, a comedy night held in his city every Monday. Jayasinha has made good on this momentum with another pun-laden show title, Sri Wanka, which will receive its final run at the Sydney Comedy Store this week.

“It started as a work in progress at the Melbourne Fringe last year,” Jayasinha explains. “It ended up becoming me taking a look at the stories in my life that I’m most embarrassed about. I wanted to see if I could put them all together and not want to go into the corner crying. I started developing a through line, where the stories connected to one another, but it wasn’t done. Between the last time I performed it at Fringe and the first time I performed the show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in March, I went over to Perth, and this fairly big incident happened there. That ended up changing the course of the show entirely – it became centred around what happened in Perth, with these other stories weaved around it. It wound up with a surprise ending – the kind that you really have to thank the comedy gods for.”

Through his many appearances on The Little Dum Dum Club, Jayasinha has gone toe-to-toe and joke-for-joke with some of the biggest names in Australian comedy, including Greg Fleet, Nazeem Hussain and Hamish & Andy – the latter of whom Jayasinha used to listen to on the radio every day during his time as an accountant. Perhaps his most interesting match-up, however, came last month in the form of Tiffiny Hall, a personal trainer best known for being one of the coaches on reality show The Biggest Loser. What could have been a bizarre clash of personalities ended up being one of the great team-ups in the podcast’s history.

“Above everything else, talking with Tiffiny was just so informative,” says Jayasinha. “It’s one of my favourite appearances on the show, absolutely. She gave some genuinely great health tips – many of which I’ve started incorporating in the way that I eat. She was really funny, too – for someone not from the world of comedy, the episode really did end up being a pretty big barrel of laughs for all of us. And even after all of that talk of eating and living healthy, we still got Ed [Kavalee, Hall’s husband] in to share stories of him smashing a buffet. I’m glad so many people enjoyed it.”

After closing the curtain on Sri Wanka, Jayasinha looks to 2017 with a new show, more touring and hopefully some fresh international jaunts – at the time of this interview, he has just performed in Malaysia, and is greatly enthusiastic about his run of dates there. For now, however, the big-hearted comic with the kookaburra laugh is just happy to keep on living out what was once a fantasy of his.

“I can remember being 11 years old and watching [Eddie Murphy’s comedy special] Raw,” he says. “I thought it looked like the coolest thing in the world – standing in front of people and telling jokes, telling stories. I think that there’s a part of me that has wanted to do it ever since that moment. It was such a faraway dream – it was completely removed from my reality as a kid in Sri Lanka. The fact that I am doing it in any capacity now, as an adult, completely blows my mind.

“I still love the absolute shit out of it, too. I’ve been doing it for six years, and I’m still chuffed that anyone watches me, or that anyone laughs at stories I have to share.”

Dilruk Jayasinha’sSri Wanka is onFriday December 2 atThe Comedy Store.

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