.
In both Australia and in Sri Lanka, she’s long had the “strange feeling” of being simultaneously a local and a foreigner, and thought this visit might be different.
“I thought, ‘oh, once I go back to Sri Lanka, I won’t think about being a woman of colour quite so much. I’ll just kind of relax into being there’.”
Since becoming a stand-up comedian in 2017, Perera has learned “there is a very sketchy definition of racism out there”.
When a joke she made about sunscreen got a lot of backlash, the former lawyer first took a legal perspective on the conflict, “like a ginormous nerd”.
“What I learned very, very quickly is that on the internet, there really is no sorting it out. There are some jokes where I reflected on them and thought, okay, maybe they have a point with this. But apart from that, you honestly just have to block, delete, move on with your life.”
In recent years, Perera has moved on from her day job as a lawyer, IVF treatments and further back, as she writes in the 2025 memoir Standstill , a destination wedding to her former boyfriend of eight years.
Sashi Perera released her memoir Standstill in August 2025.
Sashi Perera Instagram / @sashbomb
After working in some “pretty intense” situations overseas, Perera says she called off the wedding and moved to Egypt to work for an NGO before “completely crashing out” and coming home to pull herself back together.
A year after moving back to Melbourne, she was living in a seven-person share house when someone mentioned a comedy competition, and she decided to give it a crack.
After practising a five-minute set of dating stories into a hairbrush – “I was hot across Tinder and Bumble at the time” – Perera got into the state final.
To be honest, the first two years of doing gigs, I didn’t feel like I was in my body … I kept just kind of blanking out while I was on stage, but I knew that I really enjoyed being there.
Sashi Perera
“To be honest, the first two years of doing gigs, I didn’t feel like I was in my body … I kept just kind of blanking out while I was on stage, but I knew that I really enjoyed being there.”
At first, comedy was just a hobby, but after about three years, things were ramping up, and Perera realised she had to drop her day job as a refugee lawyer.
In 2024, she resigned to become a full-time comedian, then “walked around feeling like I was going to physically vomit for two weeks.”
Later that year, she wrote about her decision to stop IVF treatments around the same time – a process she and Charlie had begun a couple of years earlier following three miscarriages.
The “incredibly difficult” experience of IVF is made harder because people struggle to know how to talk about miscarriages and infertility, Perera says, and you have to manage their reactions.
“We’ve moved so far as a society, but it’s still an incredibly silent struggle that a lot of people go through, particularly in the South Asian community. It’s shameful to say that you’ve even failed at conceiving, let alone that you’re doing IVF.
“IVF is an absolute marvel of science, and it’s creating all these opportunities that we never had as humans before. But it has a relatively low success rate … It’s not that everyone who wants a baby has a baby. A lot of us just kind of have a very large invoice after the whole process.”
Sashi Perera performs her comedy show Pear Tree at BATS in Wellington from 14 to 16 May and at the Basement Theatre in Auckland from 19 to 21 May.
Supplied
As someone who had worked on “very serious issues” in an office since she was 18, Perera says going all-in on an arts career still feels like a huge risk.
“I keep looking over my shoulder like, is this allowed for an adult to be having quite this much fun? My absolute favourite thing is just being in a room filled with people and leaving whatever is happening on the day outside those walls and just laughing inside them. That’s the feeling that I keep following, and hopefully it’ll keep leading somewhere lovely.”
She encourages anyone else attracted to trying out stand-up comedy to take the leap.
“The usual reaction is terror, so if there’s anything about it that sounds exciting to you, you’re probably a great person to be on stage.”
Sashi Perera performs her comedy show Pear Tree at BATS in Wellington from 14 to 16 May and at the Basement Theatre in Auckland from 19 to 21 May.
Supplied
