You can tell it’s been two years since Nish Kumar’s last live show – as long as it’s possible, surely, for this most vociferous of comics to keep a lid on things. The first 10 minutes of It’s in Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves are like a dam bursting: he’s got so much to say about the state of our benighted nation, so many apoplectic opinions to advance. It’s a cracking opening, as the Mash Report man hurls himself at the government’s handling of Brexit (“an Ocean’s Eleven of rank incompetence”), the revelation that makes sense of Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the high British Asian vote to leave the EU.
On that latter topic, members of his own family aren’t spared, and if the punchlines here are more playground abuse than Shavian wit – well, Kumar’s bad temper is part of the joke. Most of the gig is delivered at a high pitch of dismay: we’re never far from the next screech of exasperation, at “random” airport bag checks on brown people, or at the post-Office career of Ricky Gervais.
Sometimes, the jokes fall away, and we get his anger uncut – at the contrasting reactions, say, to white versus brown criminality. A closing call to arms – to fight against rising illiberalism – is delivered with similar sincerity. But usually, Kumar plays the fool: the shmuck whose DVD collection is full of #MeToo offenders; the Simpsons fan wounded by Lisa’s cloth ear for racial politics; the Question Time guest who gets invited only because Romesh Ranganathan is otherwise engaged.
Few watching this gig would begrudge Kumar his voice in the political conversation – certainly not the, ahem, “metropolitan elite”, whose worldview Kumar is scrupulously on-message with. More than once he footnotes his own material (the joke about male feminists; the routine about Louis CK) to assuage woke sensitivities. There’s little to subvert the certainties of his Soho audience – even if Kumar’s had some “tricky” gigs, he says, on the road. Perhaps, but surely only the bloodiest-minded Brexiteer could stifle a smile at this high-octane, self-mocking political comedy show.
At Soho theatre, London until 4 October. Then touring until March.
