“You have to justify telling jokes about the news at a time like this.”
That’s what British political comedian Nish Kumar said in 2022, during his last tour. A lot has happened since then, and Nish is performing in the US now. So, how has this feeling changed?
“It’s got worse!” Nish laughs, sitting on a couch in the green room ahead of his show at Brooklyn’s Bell House on February 28. “It’s insane. It sometimes feels completely counterintuitive. Sometimes I have existential crises about what I’m doing.”
Nish has performed sparingly in the US before, but Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe marks his first true North American tour. Despite the existential crises and overwhelming state of the world, “it’s been really, really fun,” he says.
Performing for American audiences is a bit different than for British audiences, Nish explains – but not in the way you might think.
“Generally, Americans particularly are a bit more voluble than the British,” he says. “It’s also very funny that your comedy clubs have a two drink minimum, which is just culturally not something we would ever understand. British people would never be able to understand they would have to be told by a vendor that they have to buy a certain amount of alcohol.”
“That just is not in our cultural DNA. Our schools have two drink minimums!” he laughs. “And generally, people are more loud here, which is good for me because I’m very loud. So, it makes me feel more at home.”
While much of Nish’s new show revolves around politics in the US and UK, it’s also partially about how he views himself as a comedian – and how others view him.
“During the pandemic, I was walking in the park near my house and I was on the phone to my brother, screaming about the British government,” Nish says. “I locked eyes with a guy while I was screaming and he just kept walking. When I got home, he had added me in a tweet and it said, ‘I saw Nish Kumar in the park, and it turns out it’s not a character.’”
Nish got a kick out of his reaction: “He saw me doing that and was like, “oh, that guy’s like that literally all the time.”
The show is also bookended by a complaint from a friend of a friend: “I think your friend Nish is funny, but can he do some jokes about the things in his fridge?” In addition to the overwhelming onslaught of political events, Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe revolves around two questions inspired by this: “Why do this fucking show? Why not do something more fun?”
“I definitely sometimes worry that what we’re doing [as political comedians] is not really contributing in the fight against these nefarious forces that are going against us. The way that I’m rationalizing it at the moment is that I’m never going to change somebody’s opinion,” Nish says. “But increasingly, I think the value in what I do is not actually really to do with me, it’s actually to do with the audience.”
Nish has performed across the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US. But he’s noticed that, overwhelmingly, cultural differences don’t change the audience makeup of his shows. “The more and more shows that I do, the more I realize that the people that come and see me here are kind of the same people that come and see me in the UK,” he says. “It’s not an age group really, or a gender, or a sexual orientation, or even an ethnicity or race. It’s like a type of person.”
Nish touched on this in his last show, Your Power, Your Control. “The audience that I perform to is very varied,” he reflects of the joke, “apart from their political outlook. The entire audience is people who either have paid subscriptions to The Guardian or The New York Times or recently cancelled their subscription to The Guardian or The New York Times in protest that the papers were insufficiently left-wing.”
People often think Nish’s material differs based on the type of audience he’s performing to. “I don’t think you’re quite understanding what I’ve done to my audience,” he says. “I’ve conducted a process of global homogenization!” No matter where in the world he’s performing, his audience is generally “the same kind of person, who’s worried about a lot of the same stuff.”
Nish has been a “comedy nerd” since he was young. “This whole thing is a hobby that got out of hand,” he says. While he loves all forms of stand-up, his early inspirations led him to pursue political comedy specifically. These inspirations include the first few seasons of The Simpsons – which he calls “a hugely political show” – and British sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, which featured all British South Asian performers and was an “amazing and totally eye-opening” thing for him to see. He also references Chris Rock’s turn-of-the-millennium HBO specials as an influence.
“It’s a short, squeaky-voiced man of colour screaming about the news at the start, and then it goes into other topic areas,” he says. “If you watch those three specials and then you see what I do in stand-up, I’m not really hiding my inspirations in a lot of ways.”
For Nish, the benefit of political comedy is making himself and his audience “feel better for a moment about things that feel scary,” as he says in Your Power, Your Control. “And that’s what I think comedy still is able to do. You can’t change minds, but you can make people feel better about scary things. That’s why I tell so many jokes about racism. I tell a lot of jokes about racism because it still really scares and upsets me.”
“I’m allergic to this idea of people going, ‘comedy is really important,’ he clarifies. “No, it’s not! There’s a mad old Italian football manager who said about football that ‘it doesn’t matter, but of all the things in life that don’t matter, it matters the most.’ That’s how I feel about comedy.”
“When you’re all laughing at something, you’re hoping that it makes the audience feel less alone, because there’s people around that are all laughing at the same thing,” Nish explains. And for him, watching and performing stand-up have the same function. “You tell a joke and then everybody laughs, and then you’re like, ‘OK, so we all think that this is mad. We all think what’s happening is terrible.’ And that’s it. That’s all it provides. It’s not going to change the world.”
But it doesn’t have to. For Nish, giving the people who do change the world a break is what matters. “My audience is always full of people that work in activist spaces and charity sectors,” he says. “I’m not actually smart enough to do that stuff. What I’m good at doing is giving those people a break and letting them have a laugh.”
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