Biography

 

 

Daliso Chaponda was born in 1979. He is very proud of this achievement. He has three older brothers and he often boasts to young women that he is the shame of his family. Daliso’s earliest aspiration was to become a reverend but alas, he enjoys sinning too much. Standup Comedy is the closest he has come to his initial dream of the pulpit.

Daliso began his comedy career in Canada with the acclaimed one man show ‘Feed This Black Man’. Following this, he began honing his craft in comedy clubs across Canada. Highlights included appearing on the Trans Canada Comedy Trail TV show and perfoming a One-Man character comedy about a torturer titled 'Incisions'. In 2004 he ran into immigration problems and put on the show 'Don't Let Them Deport Me'. It got rave reviews but most people thought it was a joke. It was only when he was putting on the follow up show 'They're Deporting Me Anyway' in 2005 that people realised they should have written letters to government officials, offered him their hand in marriage and so on.

 

Before leaving Canada, Daliso had appeared in the 2005 Just For Laughs Comedy Festival and he used this exposure to secure an agent in South Africa. After 6 months touring the South African comedy scene he moved to England. He regularly appears in comedy clubs and theatres across the UK. He is a versatile comedian and in one week performed a filthy set in Silhouettes Strip Club in Birmingham and then, two days later, did an all-ages one hour show about faith and family in the 2007 Greenbelt Christian Fetsival. 'Everything is funny,' he told a reporter from iafrica.com. 'Why restrict yourself?'

 

Daliso has also been known to jump on planes and tell jokes anywhere on the globe (even on the planes - whether the passenger next to him wants to listen or not). In 2008 he was part of the Melbourne, Adelaide, Cape Town and Johannesburg Comedy Festivals. Recently he opened for Sugar Sammy's World Tour in Dubai, Jordan, and 8 cities in Canada. Indeed, after numerous dramatic apologies on Daliso's part, Immigration Canada forgave him for his past tangles with their office. It was a triumphant return. Daliso also managed to track down the woman he was seeing when he left Canada and thank her for providing him with an entire hour of jokes since their breakup. She was very unhappy Immigration Canada let him back into the country.

 

Early in 2009 he did his first ever comedy show in Malawi at Umunthu Theatre. He was shocked. It went very well and he did not ruin his father's political career. He is currently writing a Malawi themed one man show he hopes to tour across Africa in 2010.

 

In addition to Standup Comedy, Daliso has also published science fiction, murder mysteries, erotica, literary fiction, religious fiction and fantasy fiction in numerous magazines and anthologies. In 2002 he was a finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard Writer’s of the Future Contest and in 2006 he was short listed for the Carl Brandon Society Award. He has had a play produced -- 'Contact' (a tragicomedy about the lives of 4 strippers), and between comedy gigs he scribbles madly away in notebooks writing his second novel. The first one was never published. It is rubbish. The next one will be better. He has also written 2 pilot scripts and a 3 hour movie script.

 

Daliso likes pineapples.