Nish Kumar implores fans not to ‘kill his vibe’ in new touring comedy
Nish Kumar, known primarily for his work on The Mash Report and Taskmaster – as well as in the stand-up arena – will be coming back to Cambridge in October.
One of The Guardian and The Telegraph’s ‘50 Best Comedians of the 21st Century’, Nish is back on tour with his new, politically-charged stand-up show, Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe.
Expect jokes about, among other things, climate change, income inequality, and Nish’s feelings about being a British Indian man who isn’t going to vote for a British Indian Prime Minister.
“It’s a stand-up show hopefully that is funny, that is about a string of incredibly unfunny subjects, I think that’s the way I’m trying to explain it,” he tells the Cambridge Independent via Zoom from his study, which has some interesting posters on the wall behind (more on that later).
What does the 38-year-old comedian, television presenter and podcast host, who started out doing sketch comedy while at university, hope people will take from the show?
“I hope that it’s number one, extremely funny and that people have a good night,” he replies, “that’s always the challenge with these things… that’s really all you can hope for at these kind of shows.”
Nish has been testing the show out at some work-in-progress gigs and will be doing more of them at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, before the tour starts in September.
He notes that he audio records each performance and then uses these recordings to “reshape and improve the material”.
“The voice recordings are incredibly helpful in shaping the material,” he observes, “it’s absolutely essential, I would say, for me.”
Inevitably with this kind of show, the material may also change depending on what’s happening in the news.
“Yeah, there’s an element of that as well,” confirms Nish, “and that will happen closer to the time.
“I try and make sure every show that there’s kind of 60-70 minutes that’s pretty much the same every night, and then there’s 20 minutes that I do in the first half before the interval that will change and get rewritten constantly.
“And obviously touring September to the end of November, I’m probably going to be touring around an election so there’ll be a lot of chopping and changing, I imagine.”
On what he thinks will happen at the upcoming general election, Nish says: “I’m not really giving an opinion here, so much as I am restating the opinions of various experts in polling, it would be a historic upset if the Conservative Party were to win the election, based on all of the available polling data.
“A poll that came out over the weekend suggested that they might be in for a worse result than 1997, but obviously polls could change, things could tighten.
“But at the moment, I don’t believe in the history of political polling in this country, a political party has come back to win an election being in this position, when the election is less than a year away.”
Nish touches on the subject of Rishi Sunak in the show and comments: “I think it’s a fascinating phenomenon to be reckoning with the first Prime Minister of colour and the fact that he’s a Prime Minister who is ethnically Indian, from a Hindu Indian family – there’s a lot of overlaps in our shared experience.
“I think that’s an interesting area to touch on certainly. I would say that we have quite divergent political views, and I think it’s an interesting point of reference.”
Would Nish, a fan of Chris Rock, Chris Morris, Ross Noble, Goodness Gracious Me and The Simpsons, describe himself as a ‘political comedian’?
“I’ve done a lot of broadcast work certainly that is politically-based,” he says, “and a lot of the stand-up that I’ve done has been politically-based…
“I mean I’d still consider myself to be a stand-up comedian first and foremost, but I can’t really sit here and say I’m annoyed that people think I’m a political comedian given how much of my output is politically motivated.”
Nish likes to invite new, up-and-coming acts to tour with him, praising the likes of Kemah Bob, Priya Hall, Leila Navabi and Catherine Bohart and describing them all as “great”.
“Obviously when you start to see those people come through and they’re doing gigs – and then you start to see them on TV and you see them becoming the kind of go-to comedians, it’s a really exciting thing to get to see more and more new ways of doing comedy come through,” he enthuses, “so those are just examples off the top of my head of people who I think are very good.”
Nish recently came to the defence of fellow comic Rosie Jones, after she had received negative comments online related to her cerebral palsy.
His words “Rosie Jones is the best” subsequently led to him receiving abuse. “I don’t want those people to like me,” he states firmly.
“If you have a problem with Rosie Jones, you have a problem with me. She’s another one who’s supported me on tour because I just saw her do stand-up and thought she was incredible, and she’s an amazing comic.
“She gets a very specific volume of abuse because she’s a person who’s very visible and has a disability – and also people can’t accept their own prejudice.
“They don’t like being called prejudiced, but you can see what they’ve written about her and it is prejudiced and it is ableist.
“But when she rightfully names that as prejudiced, they then get very, very angry and the only thing I said was that I think she’s absolutely great.
“And when those people started yelling at me, I was like ‘Good, I don’t want you to like me, I’m glad, I think that your regressive values are not something I particularly want’ – I don’t want those people to come to my shows.
“People have got too much time on their hands, and also I have sympathy for people who don’t think I’m funny but it’s not to do with my ethnicity!
“They also sometimes get caught up in these waves of people that are just going ‘How dare he have a go at us and our country!’
“And then there’s other people there going ‘Woah, I don’t have a problem with him being Asian, I just don’t think he’s good’ – and I have sympathy for those people. It is a very strange thing.”
Nish has a couple of other projects ‘on the go’.
“I do a weekly news podcast that takes up a lot of my time,” he notes. And on Sky TV now is his show with Josh Widdicombe called Hold the Front Page.
“It’s a very fun, celebratory show about local newspapers and local journalists and local communities,” he explains.
It would be good if the pair could come and work at the Cambridge Independent, I suggest.
“Honestly, we have such a good time, and we have such a nice time working with the local journalists,” says Nish.
“And on a more serious note, local newspapers are incredibly important to the functioning infrastructure of journalism, which itself is then an important part of the infrastructure of a functional democracy.
“I remember a couple of years ago when Liz Truss was still Prime Minister for that brief, 20-minute window, and she gave a string of radio interviews to local journalists.
“And there were a lot of national journalists who were a bit sniffy about it, and sort of were saying ‘Well, she’s trying to dodge difficult questions’.
“But I’ve worked with local journalists and I knew that she was in big trouble because local journalists tend to be very well-briefed in the issues of their region, but they also have an understanding about how those intersect with national politics – and she got absolutely flame-grilled.
“Something similar happened to Sunak a couple of days ago as well.
“They consistently underestimate local newspapers, and also they need to look at the funding models for all of these things, because social media’s kind of hollowed out the ways in which newspapers make money.
“And it’s not good for us as a society that people get their information through social media, because there’s an idea that it’s a democratisation of information, but no, it’s just companies owned by three extremely wealthy men, so it’s worth examining how that’s been allowed to happen.”
One of the posters on Nish’s wall caught my eye. It was a picture of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara doctored slightly to look like someone else, but who?
“That’s me,” says Nish, “that’s actually production artwork from when I used to make a TV show in here – because during the lockdown, we were making The Mash Report.
“We were supposed to start the fourth series of that in April 2020, and so there was a sudden sort of hasty re-evaluation of our entire production process, and so we ended up having to make it in this room.
“So that’s production art; there’s a cat poster that says ‘stay indoors’ and then there’s a picture of me photoshopped onto Che Guevara’s face, which is a sort of reference to how I was perceived in sections of the Conservative press at the time.”
Nish Kumar will be at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Thursday, 24 October. Tickets, priced £25.50, are available from cornex.co.uk. For more on Nish, go to nishkumar.co.uk.
