Sam Smith is a comedian, MC, podcaster, children’s author, television star, ex-dentist, musician, raconteur extraordinaire – and host and MC of two key events in MS Awareness Week this month. Christine Young tries to keep up as Sam talks about his many and varied talents.

Sam exudes enthusiasm as he talks about the many strands that make up his extraordinarily busy and entertaining life.  He was born in Christchurch, but moved to the UK, Nelson and then to the North Shore, where he attended Wairau Intermediate and Westlake Boys’ High School before heading south to Otago to study dentistry. After a short stint in Wellington, he returned to the Shore, where he now lives.

Sam may have trained as a dentist, but before dentistry came comedy and music. As a boy he sang in the Nelson Cathedral choir. (With a name like Sam Smith, he says, you have to be a singer – but he’s not THAT Sam Smith.) He is, however, a Westlaker who sang in the Westlake barbershop quartet for all his five years at the school. At one stage he “did some opera stuff’ but it wasn’t really his thing – bands, playing bass and guitar and “a bit of piano” were more his style.

Comedy started at Westlake too, when he auditioned and got into a comedy show. Through this he learned stand-up, under Jeremy Elwood, his mentor and later colleague on TV3’s ‘7Days’. Comedy, music and writing continued as he studied dentistry, and by the time he graduated he’d been doing the capping show for five years, and loving it.

Dentistry seems an unlikely career partner to the creative arts, but Sam also loved that. The attraction, he says (tongue in cheek?), was that “you can call yourself a doctor but you only work nine to five”. More seriously, he saw it as a way of helping people. “It’s a nice hands-on job,” he says. “The days go really quickly,” and “ripping teeth out” is “strangely fun”, he claims.

 After graduation, Sam started practising dentistry in Wellington, and also completed a Master of Arts in Scriptwriting. His comedy writing career also took off, kick-started via a convoluted series of connections to ‘7Days’ which led to writing jokes for the then recently launched programme. “It was a mix of the things I love,” he says, facilitated by working as a dentist four and a half days a week, and devoting Wednesday afternoons to comedy writing. He still has that 7Days  job 15 year later, he adds.

One thing led to another: from writing jokes on ‘7Days’, to script-writing for ‘Jono and Ben’, to writing for ‘Sunny Skies’, ‘Family Feud’ and ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and doing audience warm-ups. These in turn led to work on ‘The Project’ and to what might be called the pinnacle of his tv career to date, appearing on and winning ‘The Traitors’.

Appearing in ‘The Traitors” had a greater impact personally than he had ever imagined it would. He knew it would be “cool”, going away to “play games for 10 days and with so many cool people to hang out with”.  And yes, he won the $30,000 prize, with colleague Anna Reeve. But he had entered the programme feeling like an outsider, an underdog, as so many people with disabilities do. “People who have anything different from the ‘norm’ have to show people they’re still [capable]. You have to prove yourself, to society and to yourself,” he says.

It was important to Sam that the other contestants knew he had poor vision and that it was part of his MS. He may even have played on this a little to garner sympathy in the early episodes. But he also wanted to succeed without support. And he did. In one test he was the only person in his group who scored any points. “That emphasised to me that even with a disability I could still be useful, still contribute to the group…. I felt like, with MS, things can still be awesome.” Being able to not only hold his own, but win, “I was so proud of myself. It was a highlight and I think about it still to this day.”

The “warm-up” gigs started when ‘Jono and Ben’ needed an audience warm-up person. No one else was keen to do it, claims Sam modestly, but he “liked meeting new people”, and the warm-up work continues, most recently for the New Zealand Music Awards.

In June 2015 Sam woke one night to find his right leg and arm were numb. Doctors “managed to put a name to this thing” that had happened to him and he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease of the central nervous system in which the immune system attacks the protective covering of the nerves. Within six weeks he had a second attack and was put onto treatment that reduces the severity of the attacks. Medication has evolved over decade since, and Sam now has an infusion every six months “that keeps things at bay”.

MS is different for each person, says Sam. For some it impacts on their ability to walk; others lose, as Sam initially did, sensation in different parts of the body. For Sam, it resulted in his losing most of his vision. 

Sam says MS was the “best thing that ever happened to me” before quickly retracting that as he feels it belittles MS and makes too light of its life-changing impacts. He knows MS can be a devastating diagnosis, especially for people with no knowledge of the condition and/or seriously physically impacted. He was “lucky” in several respects. First, he had knowledge of the disease as his grandfather had had it. Secondly, he had an alternative career to fall back on.  “I never did dentistry again once I was diagnosed,” he says. He started doing more work as a warm-up guy, and let his dentistry registration lapse. “I knew I was not going to do that again…. And when I lost my eyesight, it was ’oh cool, I’ve made the right decision’.”

Losing his eyesight opened yet another career door for Sam. He became a children’s author. As his two sons grew, Sam was conscious of not being able to read bedtime stories. But he could write a poem to recite to them as a bedtime ritual.

He wrote his first book ‘Snake Brought Cake’ as a birthday party poem with Harry (his older son’s name) the hero of a zany zoological party. Sam sent his mother the script to check her reaction. Next thing she’d sent it to a literary agent, and Sam received a call from publishing company Hachette. ‘Snake Brought Cake’ was published in 2022.

Then came ‘Miles and Jones’, a graphic novel for five- to eight-year-olds, in which Sam relives some of his childhood fantasy dreams and adventures, figuring that if the kid in him enjoyed such adventures, so might other kids. The second ‘Miles and Jones’ book will be published next February. Most recently published is ‘Don’t Scare the Dentist’, a clever play on the child-scared-of- dentist scenario; a coalescence of his two career loves, and one with a serious message told in a typically Sam Smith way.

“When I was a dentist, I loved working with kids,” he says. “They’re silly and funny…. I thought of this idea where the dentist was scared of the kids. I wanted to set kids up with the mindset that the dentist is not a scary place to go.” In fact, he notes, it’s the parents who are often scared; he’d spend time joking with the kids, getting their trust, only to have it undone by a parent’s behaviour. He’d love the book to create a generation of kids who are not scared of dentists.

Also in 2017, around the time he lost his sight, Sam received a call from Ingrid Minett, general manager of MS Auckland, asking if he’d help run a fundraising comedy evening. This was a sell-out success, the first of what have become annual sell-out events, and Sam was asked not only to MC another comedy evening, but also become an MS Ambassador, a role that encompasses demystifying MS to the public as well as to those diagnosed with the disease, and hosting and MCing events for MS Auckland.

This month as part of MS Awareness Week, Sam hosts a Comedy Night at the home of comedy, The Classic, where he did his initial comedy training 21 years ago. As with ‘Don’t Scare the Dentist’, aspects of his life spiral and intersect. A few days later, he MCs the MS Mile and Market.

Sam turns serious for a bit: “There’s probably someone in your life you know but you have no idea they have MS.”  Most people think MS is “one size fits all”, an inevitable progression from walking stick to wheelchair. What they don’t know is that some people have one attack and never have another. Others have multiple attacks, with differing impacts for each person and with no inevitable progression of the disease. Sam says his granddad lived with MS until he was 78; the disease has been around a long time and newer medications have more efficacy and fewer side effects.

He exhorts, “if you know someone with MS, ask them about it…, ask if there is any way you can help.” Talking about it can be helpful to you both. Sam is looking forward to talking about his MS during MS Awareness week and any other opportunities he can, while further developing the career he has carved out since his diagnosis. His ambitions once were to be in a sitcom and to write comedy. He’s ticked those off, but next on the horizon, commissioning gods willing, is a – guess what? – tv show about a dentist who gets MS, co-written with television screenwriter Amanda Alison.

He'll keep on with the “craziness” of the ‘Miles and Jones’ books, and he’ll no doubt find time to fit in music, song-writing and a whole lot more comedy, as well as engaging people with the reality and possibilities inherent in living with a disability.

MS Awareness Week 9-15 September:

Sam hosts Comedy Night, Tuesday 11 September, 6.30pm at The Classic 321 Queen St, Auckland CBD

Sam MCs for the MS Mile and Market Saturday 14 September, 11am-1pm at Auckland Domain

Details at https://www.msakl.org.nz/whats-happening/