The former Mash Report star’s latest show takes aim at his manosphere-courting, Saudi comedy festival-attending peers. Could he be the angry progressive standup we need right now?
Nish Kumar – mop of curly hair, Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, fancy coffee shop cookie in hand – is sitting centimetres away from me in a meeting room in his publicist’s offices in Soho, central London. Nevertheless, another comedian is drawing the eye. On the wall is a massive poster promoting Prime Video’s Last One Laughing UK – and looming over us from the centre of the frame is the show’s host, Jimmy Carr.
This feels, let’s just say, a tad ironic. In Kumar’s last standup show, he recalled the time he furiously confronted Carr about his decision to appear on manosphere influencer Jordan Peterson’s podcast. (“This is a radicalisation event that’s happening on an unprecedented scale,” he told Carr.) Then there’s the blurb for his upcoming tour, Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy, in which Kumar expresses concern that comedy has been “co-opted by charlatans in service of autocrats” – partly a reference to last autumn’s Riyadh comedy festival, where Carr performed.
