Comedian Eshaan Akbar: ‘I’ve upset pretty much every group that you can think of’

Comedian Eshaan Akbar’s first ever solo tour, The Pretender, kicks off in Bristol tomorrow night (February 23) and calls into Cambridge in just over a month’s time.

The title references the idea that whether it’s you, the person you go on a date with, your boss, or the opinion-makers on TV, we’re all pretending we know what we’re doing. We don’t. And Eshaan thinks it is about time we all had a proper laugh about it.

“The title The Pretender came from one of my favourite songs – the Foo Fighters song of the same title,” explains Eshaan, host of the But Where Are You Really From podcast on BBC Sounds.

“And the reason I’ve written a show like this is primarily to be funny, that’s the main aim – that’s what you want when you’re a comedian, I suppose – but also because I feel like as a society there is a lot of pretence. And I realised that through my own life, as someone who is of mixed Pakistani/Bangladeshi heritage, who was privately educated but there on a scholarship...

“I worked in banking, I worked in government policy and there was a lot of pretence going on in terms of trying to fit in, and I realised that society, all of us, exercised this need to pretend in order to try and fit in.

“Just looking at some of the political discourse that takes place, you realise that although everybody wants to be on the right side all the time, there are numerous moments of hypocrisy because we’re all just trying to survive. So really it’s a show exploring all the pretending that we do.”

Eshaan also hosts the Panic Room podcast on Audible, and the business podcast Nine Twenty Nine, which has been nominated as Best Business Podcast at the British Podcast Awards. He is an accomplished radio presenter, having hosted his own shows on the BBC Asian Network and LoveSport, with many guest appearances across other networks.

Television appearances include Live at the Apollo, Mock the Week, QI, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, The Big Asian Stand-Up, and Good Morning Britain. He also voiced Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Narendra Modi and others on Spitting Image.

“When I started comedy, I was a communications and speech writer to the CEO of HSBC – quite a serious job, based out of Canary Wharf,” reveals Eshaan, who has supported the likes of Jason Manford, Sindhu Vee, Dane Baptiste, Hal Cruttenden and Rory Bremner on tour.

“I just did comedy as a kind of side thing; I had no ambitions or intentions of becoming a comedian. Then a year later, I did a warm-up for Micky Flanagan on a small boat in the Embankment – to probably less than 100 people – and that was the first time I decided that perhaps I ought to consider this seriously.

“I never grew up watching comedy or thinking that comedy could be a suitable career, and in a sense, as clichéd as this sounds, comedy kind of chose me.”

Eshaan cites Kevin Bridges, Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle as his three favourite comics – “people who are willing to push the envelope a bit”. Eshaan also likes to “push the envelope a bit” in his own comedy.

“In the eight years I’ve done comedy, I’ve upset pretty much every single group you can think of and to me that’s a sign that my comedy’s hitting the right notes,” he says. “Luckily it’s not one particular group; lots of different groups at different times have taken umbrage with things I’ve said and I enjoy that – I enjoy the controversy that it creates now and then.

“You can’t please everybody all the time, and because I’m not very open about my political leanings... I don’t want people to come and watch me because they agree with me politically, I don’t think that’s what comedians should do.

“Comedians should be able to poke fun at every side of an argument and defend or attack the other side that they’re going for, because they want to make people laugh.

“I know I’ve infuriated a lot of people by not being particularly tribal and I think social political discourse has become quite tribal over the years and hopefully with my comedy people will see that there’s no need to do that.”

Eshaan got the Spitting Image gig despite not being a voice actor. “If you ever listen to me on YouTube, you’ll say, ‘Well Eshaan’s just doing his normal voice’ and therein lies part of the problem,” he notes.

“The reason, and some of this I talk about in the show, is decision makers want to make the right decision by casting a brown person to do brown people voices, but the people’s voices I did, well, Rishi Sunak is very much a British guy,

born and raised in Southampton.

“So it’s just as feasible that you would do Rishi Sunak as I would, but the discourse seems to be that only a brown person can do a brown person’s voice, and it’s not a brown person’s voice, he’s got an English person’s voice, but there we are. That’s one of the things that I talk about.”

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Eshaan has put on three sell-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, as well as sell-out performances at London’s Soho Theatre. Eight years after he first opened for Micky Flanaghan, he recently did so again, but this time at the Edinburgh Playhouse in front of three and a half thousand people, as opposed to fewer than 100.

Eshaan Akbar will be doing his thing at the Cambridge Junction (J2) on Friday, March 31. Tickets, priced £15.50-£18, are available at junction.co.uk. For more on Eshaan, go to eshaanakbar.com.