London-born comedian Nish Kumar has made a career of calling bullshit on just about anything – and anyone – orbiting the realm of British politics. And he’s very good at it.
A regular fixture on UK screens, and former host of acerbic current affairs programme The Mash Report, Nish is taking his latest comedy global – and he’s keen to bring the vibes down across multiple continents.
The initial trigger for Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe, his latest standup show, was a boyish desire to borrow a track name from Kendrick Lamar, one of his favourite artists. But the adjusted title does fit nicely into a number of themes explored within the show itself.
Nish Kumar tour dates:
- Melbourne Arts Centre Melbourne, Pavilion: April 8-20
- Sydney Factory Theatre: April 22
- Perth Rechabite Hall: April 27
- Brisbane Princess Theatre: April 29
Check out our gig guide, our arts guide, our festival guide, our live music venue guide and our nightclub guide. Follow us on Instagram here.
Nish explains to me over Zoom, dialling in from one of his tour stops in Nashville, “During the pandemic I was in a park near my house, doing one of our fucking state-sanctioned daily walks, and I was talking to my brother who lives in Germany on the phone. I was in the middle of, like, furiously screaming into my phone about how the Conservative Party in the UK had fucked up the pandemic response.”
As he was screaming into his iPhone, he recalls, “I saw a guy kind of lock eyes with me. I thought, ‘I think that guy kind of recognises me,’ but then when I got home, he had gone on Twitter and said, ‘I saw @MrNishKumar in the park today and it turns out it’s NOT a character.”
The incident transpired to be something of a definitive moment of Nish’s career, in which he had become so well known by his politics-trashing television personality that it could authentically transfer to his day-to-day existence.
This specific way in his public profile had been condensed into one attribute, combined with standup material which revolved around contemporary blood-boiling global issues, drove Nish to ask two questions which form the spine of Don’t Kill My Vibe.
Nish outlines the first as, “What the fuck is going on, globally? And the second, kind of subsidiary question that wraps the whole thing up, is why would you do standup about these subjects? Why not actually do something fun and entertaining, that gives people respite?”
Light and fluffy is not, ultimately, on Nish’s agenda.
Renowned for high-volume and hot-tempered rants about everything from a black James Bond to Clippy the virtual PC assistant, he has been described by The New York Times as “Seinfeld meets Noam Chomsky” and is proudly resistant to feel-good standup.
The return to Australia is a welcome trip for Nish, having first performed at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2014. He explains the new show is adapted for two different audiences, those within the UK more likely to understand regional jokes; and the rest of the world, which will hear more generalised material.
He stipulates that 80% of the show is carried over to all regions, given its focus on his own personal life as well as larger, all-consuming issues such as climate change and deregulated capitalism.
Some light and easy topics, then.
Of course, Nish Kumar is not one likely to action a change of pace after running politically-engaged comedy for as long as he been on a stage. He has reached a point in his career, aged 39, where he can appreciate quite how long he has been around.
“I meet a lot of people like you,” he says, “who are fully-grown adults, able to vote in elections, who will say, ‘I’ve been watching you on TV since I was a teenager.’” He laughs, “Fuckin’ hell, I have been doing this a long time! It’s very gratifying… I guess it means, you’ve been around, you have some staying power, which is really cool.”
When asked to look back on the time he has spent in the spotlight, he pinpoints his guest appearance on the Conan O’Brien show in 2019. “At the end of the show, I was just staring at this man and I remember thinking, ‘You wrote the “Monorail” Simpsons episode.’ All comedy nerds my age know every word of that episode. I definitely had a strange moment with the idea that it was very odd to be stood next to the guy that wrote that. An out-of-body experience.”
With any luck, his new run of shows down under might rank up there with his career highs in the years to come.
Nish Kumar’s world tour comes to Australia and New Zealand across April and May. Buy your tickets here.
