Shazia: fame, infamy and infidels
Comedian Shazia Mirza is back in the news with a hit new show. But, to her mother’s eternal disappointment, there’s still no husband in sight, writes Julia Molony
SHAZIA Mirza is a headline-grabbing, controversial comedienne — which is not exactly a job for the faint of heart. But compared to her previous one, trying to teach biology and chemistry in some of London’s toughest schools, she reckons the comedy circuit is a walk in the park.
“Once you’ve been in that kind of situation, stand-up comedy is really easy,” she says, tucking into a fancy juice in the ultra-hip private members club Shoreditch House. We are only a few miles away from the inner London comprehensives where she stiffened her spine, but they might as well be a world apart from here.
“Nobody has tried ever to escape one of my gigs through a window,” she says with a smile. “Or chased me down the pavement saying “I’m not coming to your lesson . . . or I’m not coming to your gig. No-one at a gig has ever gone, ‘Oh Miss, when are you going to shut up, this is so boring. When are you going to stop talking? When is this going to be over?’ They are just there, and they want to hear everything that I’m saying. Those few months when I started doing stand-up comedy I thought, ‘Oh my god they’re all facing in the right direction — what am I going to say now?’”
Raised in Birmingham to traditional Pakistani parents, according to the conventions of her upbringing, Mirza’s future was destined to be defined by marriage to a spouse her parents approved of. Instead, she’s currently single, and enjoying a highwater mark in her career as a comedic provocateur.
Becoming a famous comedian seemed a pretty unlikely path when she was growing up. For one thing, it’s a world famously dominated by middle-aged white men. For another, she’d never seen the inside of a comedy club before she started doing stand-up. The only early indication of what was in store was that she had always been a very “attention-seeking child.”
In the end, it was her moustache that would unlock her fate. “I did a writing course,” she says. “And they asked us to write something that had to be truthful and personal to you — we had to write two minutes on it. In the end (the teacher) made us stand up in front of the class and read it out. But she didn’t tell us that we’d have to stand up in front of the class and read it out. So I wrote something very personal about my moustache.
“And it was truthful, it was honest. I had a moustache, I had to get rid of it. It was a big problem in my life. The class . . . was mainly men and they all started laughing. I realised that I could tell the truth about my life and, as long as it was the truth, people would be able to relate to it.”
The vignette about facial hair was such a hit that the teacher of the course encouraged her to go and perform “on the circuit.” Even then, thoughts of a new career hadn’t occurred to Shazia. “I did it because my teacher told me to. But I never planned to be a comedian . . . I always held on to my NUT card, because I always thought that I would go back to teaching.”
She didn’t let her membership to the teachers union lapse until eight years into doing stand-up. “And now they wouldn’t have me back, because of all the stories I’ve told about them.” Compared to what she’d experienced before, the risk of being heckled was little more than light entertainment to her.
“I used to teach in very rough schools, in Tower Hamlets and Dagenham, for about eight years,” she says. “And the kids had nothing. They would come to school in the morning and I’d say ‘why are you late?’ And they’d say things like, ‘well, I had to wait ’til my mum’s Giro came so that she could go and buy me breakfast so that I could have breakfast before I came to school . . . I remember one kid came to school in his slippers. ‘Where are your shoes?’ ‘My mum can’t afford them. We have to wait until Thursday until she gets her money.’ These kids had nothing. And as a consequence of that they had terrible behavioural problems, emotional problems, couldn’t concentrate for more than ten minutes. Me teaching them photosynthesis — why was that relevant to their life? They had no food to eat, they had no shoes to wear.”
Some of her past pupils have come and watched her do stand-up. “A couple have written to me from prison,” she says. “Which was no surprise to me. I was 21 when I started teaching. I remember going for the interview and I had to present a lesson as part of my interview, and I remember the head teacher ringing me up five minutes later and offering me the job and I remember thinking — that was quick, why is he offering me the job. It was because it was such a difficult school to teach in. I think I was the only person going for the job.”
All of which goes to show that Mirza is no delicate flower. Indeed, at one point today, when I ask her about being the subject of a tabloid-reported twitter storm (She appeared on the TV chat show Loose Women and joked that ‘Isis fighters look hot’), I catch just a glimpse of her freeze-you-at-ten-paces glacial glare, which I reckon must have been developed to keep wayward adolescent boys in check.
Without her experience in teaching, she arguably wouldn’t have hit upon the idea for her new show — her most successful outing to date, The Kardashians Made Me Do It has been enjoying a sell-out run across the UK and is now coming to Ireland. The idea was born when she watched a news story about the three British schoolgirls from Tower Hamlets who shocked the world when they ran away to Syria to become Isil brides. The analysis focussed on the girls’ fundamentalism and faith — but Mirza knew better. She felt sure that it had much more to do with hormones and romance.
“I know these girls, I used to teach these girls. Not these three girls exactly but girls like that. And I know the conversations they used to have with me and I know what they used to talk about and what they felt about their lives. They always talked about romance. It was always a very romantic idea of life and love. They never, ever spoke about religion. These were girls that wore the head scarf, and it wasn’t for religious reasons, it was for traditional, cultural reasons. Because that was the way they were brought up — their mother wore it.” She felt sure they’d been lured across to a war zone because the Isil fighters were “hot”.
“They talked about boys and it was always a romantic picture, because they always knew that one