Ray Badran

Ray Badran is an Australian comedian, writer, and actor born in Wollongong, Australia, on 29 November 1985 to Rose and Ray Badran Snr. He is known for Good News Week (1996), Best of the Fest (2014) and The Cradle of Comedy (2012). He has performed stand up comedy across Australia, Europe, United Kingdom and the United States. Badran is a Comedy Store favourite. He has written for various TV shows, SBS comedy and other projects. In 2014, he was selected to perform for the Comedy Channel's ‘Best of the Fest’. In 2015, after a successful run at the Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Sydney comedy festivals, he took a debut solo show to the Sydney Comedy Store. After becoming a regular headline act in Australia, he currently resides in the United Kingdom.

Badran has also come under fire, along with his brothers, for orchestrating an SMS competition entry racket several years in the early 2000s for significant financial gain, entering thousands of times for free- paying no SMS costs, when other honest entrants who were charged the advertised rate to enter had almost zero chance of winning.

Ray Badran has a degree in medical science but decided to follow his passion of comedy. Ray has performed two solo shows, Raised and Confused and Junior at Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2015 and 2016. Previously he has been a regular at many comedy rooms across Sydney but he has performed all around the world and is currently based in London. Ray Badran performed on the NRL Footy Show in 2012 and premiered on The Comedy Channel's showcase of Sydney Comedy Festival Cracker night in 2014. Ray has also performed solo shows at Perth Comedy Festival and Fringe World, Brisbane Comedy Festival, Sydney Comedy Festival and Fringe World. In 2015, he also recorded his first live hour DVD titled Laughter Time at the Sydney Comedy Story.

In 2017, Badran created a TV/web series with Comedy Central Australia & NZ called ‘No Experience Necessary’ starring Ray and New Zealand comedian Guy Montgomery. It received good critiques from audiences.

A vocal female audience member had been heckling the acts all evening. The material Badran did that night, including the “rape joke”, had been well honed in both the United States and Australia throughout the previous year. He'd recently performed it in Sydney in front of Chris Rock and The Chaser (both of whom praised the offensive gag). Badran estimates approximately 50,000 people had heard the gag before this gig, pointing out that its acceptability and comic value had been decided by consensus: “I’m not going to keep doing material that isn’t working”. The joke isn't actually about rape but about stereotypes in comedy, and the butt of the joke is him. It's as follows: “If you’re black you can do jokes about being black, if you’re gay you can do jokes about being gay…so I’m not sure if you can tell just by looking at me but…I can do rape jokes.”