6 minute read
5 Minutes with... Emma Malik
A laughing success
Stand-up comedy and animal training are not jobs people would often associate together, but Emma Malik has forged a career combining the two.
A dare at an open-mic comedy night propelled animal trainer and comedian Emma Malik on a unique career path as ‘the world’s first and only animal training stand-up comedian’, which has seen her perform a parrot show for the King of Malaysia and a flash dance routine on Thailand’s Got Talent.
“I’ve always loved animals. As a little girl I never really played with dolls or babies, it was always stuffed animal toys – everything was animal themed,” says UK-born Malik.
Emma Malik with her rescue dog DukDik
Growing up in a pet-loving family, Malik says it was a rescue dog her family adopted when she was a teenager that initially inspired her to take up animal training as a career.
“From the get-go, I’ve always been surrounded by animals, but what got me into animal training was a dog that we rescued called Louis.
“I was 14 years old when we got him and he had so many behaviour issues, everything from separation anxiety, reactivity, destroying the house, just everything that was going on. “We took him to dog training classes, and that’s when I first got my introduction to dog training and I just fell in love,” she says.
CREDIT: Monica Pronk
– Emma Malik, Animal Expert and Comedian
Fast forward a few years and Malik and Louis were entering obedience and agility trials together. Seeing the way Louis’ behaviour had completely changed was what sparked Malik’s interest in dog training and led her to study a diploma
in Animal Management and Science at Sparsholt Agricultural College, the largest agricultural college in Europe. Her big break came on her final day of college, when a lecturer asked Malik and her friends if anyone would be interested in training pigs for the BBC.
“None of my friends put up their hand but I did,” she says. “I was like, absolutely, count me in!” That first job training pigs turned into several years of training animals for commercials, films, and television. An experience that Malik says formed her abilities as a trainer. “The woman who hired me would never teach me how to train the animals,” says Malik. “Every time I’d ask her for help, she would say ‘work it out’.
CREDIT: Monica Pronk
“At the time I didn’t appreciate it,” admits Malik. “But now I realise it gave me the skills to go into any situation and hear the most bizarre requests and be able to work it out. I’m very grateful to her for that.”
Incredible variety and tight deadlines meant Malik had to adapt and learn quickly. “I worked with cows, ducks, rabbits, dogs, horses, lions, and it can all be on quite short notice. But as well as training these animals, I had to get them comfortable and happy being on a film set surrounded by so many different people.”
This time, patience, and dedication to her craft has allowed Malik to visit incredible places and hold audiences with interesting characters, such as the time she performed a parrot show for the King of Malaysia and two of his three wives.
“One of the tricks we perform is that we have a parrot retrieve money from someone’s hand. It’s kind of a standard trick at bird shows where an audience member will hold their arm out with some money in their hand and the bird will fly down, take the money, and take it back to the handler.
“I asked the king; would you like to do this? He said yes and pulled out this wad of money, the highest denomination they have in Malaysia, so I sent the bird down and it grabbed it, flew off, and ripped it up.”
CREDIT: Monica Pronk
Surviving that encounter, Malik later appeared on the first season of Thailand’s Got Talent where she was asked to bring along her freshly trained parrots and perform a ‘sporty routine’.
“I’m not a very sporty person, so I turned it into Flash Dance. I had 80s workout gear on, such as legwarmers, which are very hard to find in Thailand, and had a lot of fun with it. We were never going to win, but it was a lot of fun.”
More recently, Malik has been helping people with their pets, which she hasn’t worked with for quite some time, as she has been mostly working with zoos and aquariums.
“It’s really rewarding for me to help owners especially because of the increase in pet ownership in the pandemic and the behaviourproblems that have occurred with that.”
Comic career
The stand-up aspect of Malik’s career came one night at a comedy club, when one of her friends dared her to perform at an open-mic night, where she performed five minutes of material.
“After the show, a few of the comics came up to me and asked if I’d like to do a few gigs with them. It became a nice social hobby just meeting people. Then I started getting paid to do it, then I got signed by a manager, then I started doing solo shows, then I started doing television, then I toured the country. And now it’s become a career, which is crazy, I never thought this is what I’d be doing.”
Malik used her animal training skills to create a unique show, which features her dogs, Susan the goliath stick insect, and a goldfish.
CREDIT: Monica Pronk
“They’re the only ones I bring on stage at the moment. They have become characters in my show, so it’s more like a double act.”
Despite having been inside a shark tank, Malik says that stand-up is the scarier of the two.
“I know animals, so you can generally predict the behaviour and what’s going to happen. When you do a stand-up show, you have no idea who’s in the audience. You don’t know what they’re thinking, what kind of day they’ve been having. When you do stand-up, you’re putting yourself in a situation where you have no control.
“With animals, I’m not saying you have control, but when you’ve been doing it for as long as I have you can kind of read the behaviour of the situation and play out what’s going to happen. Whereas when you step on that stage for a set, you’re in unknown territory. At least for the first 30 seconds.”
