ROLLING WITH THE PUNCHES
Stand-up comedian Nish Kumar is back in Yorkshire with his latest tour. He tells John Blow about how the serious fallout from a bread roll missile inspired his latest show.
If you’ve paid money, you have the right to boo, I genuinely believe that. And I have no philosophical problem with an audience disliking my joke. The problem really is the fallout. Nish Kumar on reactions to his political comedy.
IT IS a good indication that Nish Kumar’s latest stand-up show takes on some weighty themes when he stresses that the new routine is, in fact, full of jokes.
A rudimentary concern, you’d have thought, but such are the topics of Your Power, Your Control – mental health, racial politics, death threats – that his urge to emphasise the levity within is understandable.
There is no doubt that the last few years have been a tumultuous period for Kumar, who says there’s an “old cliche that stand-up comedy is therapeutic in some way, but what I’ve found to be true is that therapy is much more therapeutic”.
Yorkshire audiences can see the wellreviewed show in Hull on Wednesday, after which he will perform in Yorkshire on various dates through the next few months.
The unlikely inspiration behind and nominal focus of the show, however, is a bread roll – or rather, the aftermath of a heckler using one as a missile in 2019.
The incident found its way on to YouTube, of course, and into sections of the press, blowing out of all proportion an isolated event at the Lord’s Taverners cricket charity gig.
‘Your power, your control’, says Kumar, is “a phrase mental health professionals use. They told me that I need to stop thinking about hypotheticals and should focus on what only what’s within my power in my control. I thought it was a quite nice show title.
“The big meat of the show is the story about me having a bread roll thrown at me at a charity gig for making jokes that were less than complimentary about Boris Johnson and Brexit, using that personal story as a window in which to look at some political issues about race and the way the press digests race and racism, and what challenges we face as a generation.
“But it’s full of jokes!” he adds. The incident itself, in which he was effectively booed off stage, wasn’t really the problem.
Kumar, 36, says: “One of the things that I’ve always maintained is, the person that threw the bread roll clearly needs anger management. I think if you ever find yourself with a bread roll in your hand that you’re using as a missile at the comedian whose joke you didn’t like, you have to go home and really have a long think about every decision you’ve made in your life.”
But he adds: “If you’ve paid money, you have the right to boo, like I genuinely believe that. And I have no philosophical problem with an audience disliking my joke. The problem really is the fallout of it – when it starts being written about in the press and basically something that happened in a room that gets dragged out onto YouTube, and starts being put up there in a way that you have no control over.
“That’s when things got a little bit more serious and intense and that’s kind of the second half of that story, is actually the fallout from the bread roll.”
Kumar suddenly became something of an unlikely bogeyman in rightleaning publications, being featured not in arts and culture sections but in news reports. He also talks about receiving death threats.
How does he reflect on that now? “It’s definitely not easy. It can interfere with your sense of safety and your sense of yourself. It definitely is not without its challenging moments.
“If you do the kind of comedy that I do, you expect flak and criticism but what you don’t necessarily expect is to be is feeling like you’re constantly under scrutiny from journalists and then knowing that scrutiny is going to be fed further down the line into people sending you death threats. It can all feel very claustrophobic at points.
“That’s why it’s been it’s been a godsend to actually have a professional to talk through these things with in terms of its impact on my mental health, and I feel much better about all of it now.”
Kumar has had talking therapy and learned “emotional regulation”, but didn’t specifically set out to write his routine about mental health. His shows are always just about what’s going on in his life more generally.
“I think when I was younger, it was more about funny stories that happened to me. And then it became more political and observations about the political theme. I mean, more funny things happen to you when you’re in your mid-20s because you’re sort of running around town, doing gigs, getting night buses and trains in the middle of the night and you have more of and incident-packed life – hopefully – than you do in your mid-30s. I think the aim is to actually reduce the worries in your life when you get to my age. But also you become more confident in your opinions and in expressing your opinion. And so I think that’s why the tone and tenor of my comedy has changed in the last decade.”
Kumar’s parents are from the Indian state of Kerala but he was born in Wandsworth and raised in Croydon, south London, before attending St Olave’s Grammar School in Orpington.
He studied English with History at Grey College, Durham University, where he met fellow comic, Tom Neenan, with whom he formed the double act Gentlemen of Leisure and performed in the Durham Revue.
Kumar has been a solo stand-up comedian since 2013, however, and went on to perform five shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, two of which were nominated for the Comedy Award for Best Show 2015 and 2016.
He was previously host of both The Mash Report, and Late Night Mash until he stepped down in October last year, and has been regularly seen on panel and comedy shows such as Taskmaster, Live At The Apollo, QI, Have I Got News For You, The John Bishop Show, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Russell Howard’s Stand-Up Central, Drunk History and Frankie Boyle’s New World Order.
Yorkshire, too, has generally been a happy hunting ground for Kumar, who has visited the region often during his tours over the years.
“I’ve been gigging Leeds for a long time, so I have a real affection for that city and a real affection for the audience in that city because I did a lot of gigs there when I first started out and it’s one of the places that, for whatever reason, I just feel very comfortable performing in.
“Yorkshire, broadly, has always been very good to me.
“I had a really great gig in Sheffield when I was last touring in 2018 and I’m very glad to return.
“Also, I’m a huge snooker fan. My grandmother genuinely can’t believe I’m performing at the Crucible, it’s absolutely blown her mind, more than anything else I’ve done in my career. I keep having to explain to her that I’m not going there to play snooker.”
■ Nish Kumar brings Your Power, Your Control to Hull’s Bonus Arena on February 2; York’s Grand Opera House on February 9; Leeds City Varieties on February 10 and March 5; and Huddersfield Town Hall on March 9 and Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre on April 7.