“You have the propensity to become radicalised,” Nazeem Hussain was told, when the Australian secret service, Asio, summoned him for an interview and a free lunch. You can see what they mean. Hussain was formerly the jollier half of double act Fear of a Brown Planet. (His stern sidekick, Aamer Rahman, brought a solo show to Soho last year.) There’s a puppyish animation to Hussain’s routines about life as a brown person in a white person’s world, but something sharper and steelier lurks not far beneath the surface.
That makes for an intriguing combination – and an enjoyable one. Hussain, who has his own TV show, Legally Brown, in Australia, is a confident, genial host. He sends himself up – his micro-celebrity; his silly trousers. He offers us cartoonish roleplays of aggressively sporty white Aussies and his overbearing Sri Lankan mum. It’s a more crowd-pleasing act than his ex-partner Rahman’s, sometimes to a fault. The comedy south-Asian accents and jokes about arranged marriage are pretty basic. There’s also a routine about airport security, which has become the first cliche in the Muslim comedy book.
But Hussain carries it off well, playing US customs’ questions about “terrorist-related activities” with a faux-naive bat, weighing those activities as a serious career option. This and his Asio interview anecdote offer lurid insights into everyday discrimination, to which Hussain’s sardonic agitation is an understandable reaction. A later routine depicts – funnily, and rather tenderly – the average white person’s brain breakdown on hearing that Hussain hasn’t drunk alcohol in his life. He tries to work it out on his fingers; the confusion is total.
It’s a fine solo debut that mixes striking insights into life on that brown planet with more generic identity comedy. Slough off the latter, and Hussain has the potential to become very good indeed.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 30 May. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
