‘Even if I could save just one person, for me, I’ve done my job’
Comedian and children’s author Humza Arshad talks comedy and activism with Prudence Wade
For someone made an MBE and with nearly 500k Youtube subscribers, the career highlight that really makes Humza Arshad’s eyes light up was meeting his idol, The Rock.
“That was incredible,” Arshad says excitedly. “If someone said, ‘You can meet only one person’, it would be The Rock.”
Meeting Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in Los Angeles might be a personal high, but Arshad has plenty more to be proud of. After going to drama school, the 35-yearold was an early adopter of Youtube and found fame with his comedy web series, Diary Of A Bad Man.
Arshad describes the main character as “this young British Pakistani Muslim, growing up in South London trying to be bad, but he’s not bad at all, and he keeps getting in trouble – but he learns from it”.
This soon morphed into a series of children’s books based around ‘Little Badman’ and his various adventures – the most recent of which is Little Badman And The Radioactive Samosa (“it’s literally about a radioactive samosa,” Arshad says, laughing).
While the various lockdowns and Covid-related restrictions have been tough this past year, Arshad also admits he’s appreciated the space it’s given him to write. “It’s good, because you don’t have the pressures of going out and doing other things,” he says. “So I have more concentration and more available time to be in my element, be alone in my room and just start writing.”
Arshad released his first children’s book back in 2019 (co-written with Henry White), but he’s always been a storyteller. As a child, he says “I would always find myself lining up all my toys and instead of just playing with them, I would make a film. I would always, at a young age, be obsessed with creating content, creating stories or sketches.”
Humour is something he’s also managed to balance with activism.
“I always wanted to give back to the community and spread positive messages, and that’s how I got more involved in whether it was tackling knife crime or gang violence, whether it was radicalisation or Islamophobia, or toxic masculinity – whatever I could get my teeth into. I just knew I had a voice where people would listen.”
This responsibility comes with a certain level of pressure, of course. “If you think about it too much, you will go insane,” Arshad admits.
Instead, he focuses on the “blessed feeling to know I have this opportunity to help someone else. Even if I could save just one person, for me, I’ve done my job – and I think we’ve done more than that, hopefully.”
He was recently awarded for his work tackling extremism and gang violence in the 2021 New Year Honours list, when he was made an MBE. “For a young Pakistani who grew up in South London to be able to say that he’s been recognised for the work he’s been doing, and been given an MBE, is pretty sweet.”
● Little Badman And The Radioactive Samosa by Humza Arshad and Henry White, illustrated by Aleksei Bitskoff, is published in paperback by Puffin, priced £1 (ebook 99p)