Why is Nish Kumar such a bete noir for angry rightwingers everywhere? Everybody hates him, he cries from the stage tonight, in a show that takes stock of his life as a partisan political comic who has brown skin. Its case study is a 2019 charity gig (think “millionaires in ballrooms”) where Kumar, anti-Brexit gags blazing, had a bread roll thrown at him before being booed off stage. The incident, much embellished in the press, triggered death threats, which in turn prompted a reckoning for Kumar with his brittle mental health.
This may sound like a more sobering show than you’d expect from Kumar. But it isn’t. It’s more personal, perhaps – he’s seldom before spoken about his mental fragility, not least because (as he says here) he was totally in denial about it. But the keynote is still uproarious and self-mocking, as the 36-year-old holds himself up for relentless ridicule: as the comic self-sabotaging in front of his “pre-gout” audience; as the messianic ego fantasising his own tragic assassination; and as the shmuck trying to impress people by pretending to have read Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
