Sooshi Mango

A name invented by a three-year-old

Sooshi Mango are brothers Joe and Carlo Salanitri and their friend Andrew Manfre, and until 2015 none of them worked in entertainment. Carlo ran a lighting shop, Joe sold for a living and Manfre traded scrap metal. The name has no meaning beyond a domestic accident: Joe's son, then three, shouted the two words around the house, and it stuck. Speaking in New York in March 2024, Joe put the moment of invention on the toilet, which is roughly the register the group has worked in ever since.

What they had instead of a plan was a subject nobody in Australian comedy was mining at that scale. The trio grew up Italian-Australian in Melbourne, surrounded by Greek, Lebanese, Maltese and Eastern European families, and their earliest Facebook clips — "Italians Vs Greeks" and the "Ethnic Dads" series — simply reproduced that world without translating it for anyone outside. The dads became Johnny, Vince and Sam, played by Joe, Carlo and Manfre respectively, and the wives Giuseppina, Carmela and Angela followed, along with Greek neighbours Costa, Tasso and Stavro. Manfre has described the turning point in flat terms: things took off once the three of them had chemistry together.

From Facebook clips to three nights at Rod Laver

The move to stage happened quickly. In 2018 they appeared in Star Wogs alongside Nick Giannopoulos and Mary Coustas, the pair who had already built a career from the same material a generation earlier. Their own first full touring show, Fifty Shades of Ethnic, ran 33 performances across more than ten Australian cities in 2019 and sold out fourteen of them. Later that year Ethnic Vacation – The Invasion of Canada tested whether the jokes travelled, playing Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal to diaspora audiences who, it turned out, recognised every character.

Off The Boat in 2022 was the production that changed their scale. It ran to 44 shows and sold more than 100,000 tickets, and the group became the only comedy act to sell out Rod Laver Arena three nights in a row, with two consecutive sell-outs at Qudos Bank Arena in Sydney. Live Nation's December 2025 tour announcement revised the Off The Boat total upward to over 125,000 tickets. That tour also gave them their first proper runs in North America and Britain.

The rest of the business grew around the live work rather than beneath it. The podcast Saucy Meatballs launched in September 2021 and its trailer reached Spotify's ten most-listened tracks inside a day; guests have ranged from then-prime minister Scott Morrison to the UFC champion Alexander Volkanovski, Coolio, Tina Arena and Russell Peters. They won the AACTA award for Favourite Australian Digital Comedy Creator in 2021 and were nominated again in 2022. They appeared in Wog Boys Forever in October 2022. There is a wine label, Johnny, Vince & Sam's Vino, launched in 2022, whose Sangiovese '21 became the best-selling Sangiovese in Dan Murphy's stores nationally, and a restaurant of the same name that opened on Lygon Street in Carlton in 2023 with the restaurateurs Johnny Di Francesco, Dani Zeini and Steven Ballerini.

Home Made, and the farewell that didn't take

Home Made launched as an Australian arena tour in 2024 and kept extending: past 30 arena dates in its first cycle, then a 2025 Home Made Encore run that added more than fifteen shows, many of which sold immediately. The Brisbane leg played the Concert Hall at QPAC on 3 August 2025, with tickets from $69.90 to $309.90 and meet-and-greet packages that bundled a photograph with seats in the first five rows.

On 23 September 2025 the group added three more performances — Newcastle's Civic Theatre on 5 December, Sydney's Coliseum Theatre on 6 December and the Plenary at Melbourne's MCEC on 7 February — on sale the following afternoon and billed as the last opportunity to see the trio live before they took a break. Brisbane, Wollongong, Canberra, Perth and Adelaide had already sold out by then. The break has not happened. What followed instead was the largest touring era of their career being exported wholesale.

The Home Made World Tour

Live Nation announced the international run on 8 December 2025: 39 dates across North America and Europe, opening on 23 April 2026 at The Paramount in Huntington, New York and routing through Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, Montréal, London, Paris and Madrid. Artist presale opened on 9 December and general sale on 12 December. The announcement put the group at more than eight million social followers and cited a single video past 170 million views; promoter copy for the European leg now claims over a billion video views in total.

British demand forced an addition almost immediately. On 11 December 2025 an extra London show was confirmed at Shepherd's Bush Empire for 23 May 2026, ahead of the already-scheduled Manchester O2 Apollo on 12 June, Usher Hall in Edinburgh on 13 June and Hammersmith Apollo on 15 June. On the group's return to Britain the trio framed it in the same terms they always use: they started making videos in their cars about their parents and grandparents, and now tell those stories everywhere. Their previous UK dates, they said, had felt like playing in their own backyard.

The American leg peaked on 4 May 2026, when Home Made played The Belasco in Los Angeles as part of the Netflix Is A Joke Festival — a significant booking for an act with no streaming special to promote. Audience reaction across the North American run was strong: reviews posted after Meridian Hall in Toronto on 16 May and L'Olympia in Montréal on 17 May rated the show five stars, with repeat attendees noting a large jump in production values over earlier appearances and singling out the moments where the three performers break character and laugh at each other mid-sketch.

Where they stand in October 2026

Rather than stopping after June, Home Made picked up a second European leg this autumn, promoted out of Oslo by A Comic Soul. The group play Globe Wien in Vienna on 7 October, MTS Dvorana in Belgrade on 9 October, two shows at Kino SC in Zagreb on 11 October — the evening performance already sold out — and Media Center Cvetličarna in Ljubljana on 13 October. Then come the Strovolos Municipal Theatre in Nicosia on 20 October, the Vellidion Convention Center in Thessaloniki on 23 October, Brussels, which has sold out, De Meervaart in Amsterdam on 28 October and Teatro Tivoli BBVA in Lisbon on 2 November. Most of the remaining dates are listed as final tickets. The routing follows the diaspora rather than the comedy circuit, which is why a Melbourne sketch act is selling out rooms in Serbia and Cyprus.

The off-stage pipeline has also firmed up. Speaking on Melbourne radio's Fifi, Fev & Nick, Manfre said the group are writing a feature film and scripting material for a streamer, with a Paramount+ deal described as almost done but not signed. A book, The Day The Pizza Cried, is also in progress. A feature-length screenplay has been in development since 2022, so the film is worth treating as an intention rather than a release.

The open question is what replaces Home Made. Each touring cycle so far has been bigger than the last, and this one has absorbed three years of their working life across two continents. The characters are fixed, the audience knows the catchphrases, and the group have been honest that the whole act rests on a single seam of material — their parents' and grandparents' generation. Whether that seam extends to a second generation of jokes, or whether the film and the streaming project become the next vehicle, is the thing to watch after Lisbon.