Review: Mortified, by Pax Assadi

Those familiar with the New Zealand comedy scene will know Pax Assadi. He came onto my radar in 2020 when I saw him crush at the Comedy Gala in Wellington. Since then, he’s created and starred in his autobiographical show Raised by Refugees and more recently appeared in season six of Taskmaster NZ amongst other things.

What should readers expect when approaching his debut book Mortified (Penguin Random House, 2026)? Is it an extension of his show? A story about his journey to becoming a successful comedian? How ‘mortified’ was he about what was in this book?

The opening chapter, called ‘The Embarrassing Life of Pax Assadi’, could’ve been the book’s title. Assadi lays bare 19 of his most vulnerable, horror-inducing stories, writing about them with honesty, humility, and a fair dash of humour. It must have taken some serious self-assuredness to admit to and write about the things he’s included here. The fallout from these embarrassing stories only gets worse as the book goes on and he gets older.

If you’re like me and believe we are sent to this earth to learn important lessons, I’d say one of Pax’s lessons in this life is that comparison is the thief of joy. Almost every story in this book might’ve been avoided if younger Pax had cared less about what others thought and trusted that people would like him exactly as he was. Easier said than done of course.

Assadi deftly shows that shame only breeds more shame. When he tells the story about crashing his dad’s car and admits that he was trying to show off to a friend he felt inferior to, he’s accepting that he isn’t perfect, that humans are fallible creatures and that mistakes happen. We are, all of us, the culmination of the good, the bad, and the ugly actions we’ve taken up until now.

Earlier in the book Assadi takes on the mentality of his younger self. The stories slide into a blow-by-blow style that feels like overkill to an adult reader, but most of us will remember the sheer embarrassment of doing something ‘wrong’ as a child. Assadi coming to prizegiving in the wrong clothes is the perfect example.Through his teen years Assadi makes blunders familiar to anyone who tried to be cool or had an undying crush in high school. He was catfished, conned, humbled and had his heart broken. He perfectly describes feeling unexplainably sad as a teen as ‘the emotional equivalent of having a word on the tip of your tongue’ or ‘missing something you couldn’t name’.

There’s a tonal shift in the chapter titled ‘Night Crawler’ that Assadi admits doesn’t fit in with the other stories in the book, but that I’m glad he kept in. As a teen, an interaction with a person in authority leaves him confused, hurt and ashamed. If this is a collection of embarrassing stories, this one isn’t embarrassing for Assadi, it’s embarrassing for Aotearoa. Like with the other stories in this book, the author doesn’t flinch from telling the truth and the result is a nuanced, grounded kōrero that is an essential part of the book.

It’s easy to see that Assadi is a comedian from the style of his storytelling. I wouldn’t be surprised if the audiobook played like a six-hour comedy special. The pacing and comedic asides throughout the book make you feel like the author is in front of you leading you through these moments like he would during any other comedy set.

Assadi's embarrassing stories are different from other comedians' tales of boozy nights out and drug-fuelled benders. These are moments in his life that have kept him up at night, that are fuelled by nothing other than human error and the desire to belong. Reading this book felt like someone telling you their deepest darkest secrets at a sleepover. In an interview with Brodie Kane recently, Assadi summarised the book’s overall message perfectly: ‘what makes us interesting is the whole picture of yourself – and that includes the dumb stuff you’ve done.’