‘I was warned not to look good on stage’

Comedian Shaparak Khorsandi on drinking, death threats – and the phone call that ruined her life

The year was 1998. An anxious, young Iranian comic going by the name of Shappi Khorsandi had done “Oh I dunno, only around 20 stand-up gigs” when she got a phone call that left her feeling “utterly destroyed”. The caller was “a woman in the industry – not a comic – who said: ‘I just wanted to let you know that the other female comedians have been talking about you. And they say you’re a bit of a slag. I just thought I should tell you that you need to watch yourself at gigs because you’ve been seen having drinks with the boys, so you’re being perceived as a bit of a slut on the circuit.’”

Describing the incident more than two decades later, the brightly chatty Khorsandi has to take a breath to choke down hurt and confusion that sound as raw as if they had hit her just yesterday. “I was 25 years old at that point,” she says. “It doesn’t matter – and it shouldn’t – but I’d actually only had sex with two men at the time. But because I liked a drink, people made assumptions…”

As one of only a handful of professional female comedians finding her feet in that “strange, laddish decade” when comedy became “the new rock ’n’ roll”, Khorsandi would perform in combat trousers, wearing no make-up. While nobody would have dreamt of telling the male duo Rob Newman and David Baddiel not to unsettle less attractive men at their shows, Khorsandi had been “warned – again by other women – that if I looked too good I’d make the women in the audience jealous”. The memory makes her grimace. “Ugh! Such a divisive, antifeminist idea, that all women have nothing better to do than participate in some kind of relentless beauty pageant. Rubbish!”

But, she says: “It was that call that really messed me up. I cried and cried and cried. I didn’t trust anyone for years and I was a long way into my career before I allowed myself to make friends.” Khorsandi is glad to report that “when I tell this story to young female comics today, they’re shocked”.

The cultural shift of the past quarter-century is the theme of Khorsandi’s new stand-up show, It Was the 90s! For the most part, the 48-year-old single mother of two believes young people are “so much more sorted than we ever were… today the kids talk about ‘self care’. Back then my idea of self care was taking Berocca [vitamin tablets] after a heavy night!”

As a 1990s “ladette”, Khorsandi “thought feminism was matching the boys pint for pint”. “I threw myself straight into that culture, mimicking the worst behaviour of men,” she says. “I woke up on the pavement in Trafalgar Square after Blair won the election in 1997. I didn’t remember how I’d got there.”

The daughter of the Iranian political satirist and poet Hadi Khorsandi, Shaparak Khorsandi was born in 1973, in Tehran, where she remembers riding on a bike, on her uncle’s lap, to buy chocolate milk before dawn. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Khorsandis fled to England, where Shappi (as she became known, in a concession to Western tongues) grew up in west London “poor, with free school meals, drinking Happy Shopper cola” but with “loads of cultural capital at Iranian parties where everybody loved my dad and recited poetry”.

Khorsandi says her father was “a natural performer” and that she “has the gene”. Little Shappi often amused guests with her Margaret Thatcher impressions. But there was an undertow of terror beneath the family’s jolly social scene. Her father would receive regular death threats by post and phone, which she has since laughed off in comedy skits with an exaggerated teenage eye roll and a mimed extended telephone receiver: “Dad?! It’s for you…” In reality, the constant tension left her with such an intense fear of home invasion that, in the year after moving into her own place in 2011 – after her separation from her husband, comedian Christian Reilly – she made three latenight calls to the police.

Khorsandi, who was diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) only five years ago, tells me that she was always “made to feel like a dunce” at school. “Schools can make their minds up, unfairly, about quirky kids. At A-level, I was predicted C, D, E. I actually got A, B, C. That

In the 1990s, she ‘thought feminism was matching the boys pint for pint’

Call me Shaparak: after going by Shappi for years, the Iranian-born Khorsandi has recently reverted to her full birth name