‘I’ve been heckled, I’ve been physically attacked,” says Omid Djalili from the stage, “but I’ve never before been overcome by fumes.” Tonight, he is, after his most vocal fan in the second row vomits 20 minutes before the end of his set. Everyone within a five-metre radius scatters; the drunken offender staggers to the exit; Djalili temporises, uncertain whether the gig can continue.
It can, albeit through a pukey miasma: Djalili delivers his closing routines from behind a mask improvised from his T-shirt. It’s not the finale anyone would fantasise for the first night of their London run – nearly two years after the Anglo-Iranian comic started touring Schmuck for a Night. But nor is it a disaster for Djalili, whose entertaining but unexceptional show has been given an unearned slice of “you had to be there”.
And he fields the curveball well – as you’d expect from an act whom even his harshest critic would admit is a consummate pro. But then, does Djalili have harsh critics? He’s such a lovable presence – in movies, in sitcoms, in his primetime TV vehicles, and on stage. Even those of us who’ve quibbled for years about his over-reliance on national stereotypes and funny accents can’t work up much anti-Djalili feeling. He’s just a great stoker of fun, a silly convivial jester, lacking in pretension or self-consciousness, seemingly without a mean-spirited bone in his body.
The stereotypes and mild flouting of PC propriety are in evidence again here, as the 52-year-old riffs on Jewishness and playacts a heavily accented squabble between Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. He’s no stranger to Jewish jokes, of which there are even more than usual – perhaps because he’s not long finished performing, as Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof. There are also some transgender jokes, as now seems to be obligatory for middle-aged male comedians. Djalili’s is about Kellie (formerly Frank) Maloney, and draws largely on the comic value of their unfeminine sarf London voice.
While not as mocking as the recent trans gags of Dave Chappelle, among others, that’s not – on paper – a sympathetic joke to be telling. But Djalili largely gets away with it, as he always does. Because it’s in the context of an upbeat show that self-evidently isn’t antagonistic towards anyone. And because Djalili is so liberal in the poking of his fun. He jokes about fulsome Iranian generosity, which lasts only until your back is turned. He jokes endlessly about uptight Brits. He jokes about a barbaric department store sitcom set in Arabia: Are You Being Severed?
Yes, that’s basic. But before you can groan, Djalili gets in first with a Middle Eastern music cue and some silly dancing: his own little celebration of the cheesiness of his cheesiest gags. And there are plenty here, not all of his own devising. Some of the jokes may just sound as if they were cribbed from Bob Monkhouse’s notebooks. Others are incontrovertibly secondhand, such as the one about God explaining kosher to Moses, without which no compendium of Jewish humour would be complete. The woman in the second row isn’t the only one who’s regurgitating.
But if Djalili isn’t remotely sheepish about it (the slightest suspicion of joke pilfering might sink another comic) neither is his act as old-school as that behaviour implies. Yes, it’s stuffed with cliches and good-time theatrics that wouldn’t look out of place at the end of a pier. But it’s also upfront about the state of the real world, as our host addresses Trump, Brexit and – at the top of the set – the recent political protests in Iran.
Occasionally, he seems to be venturing a meaningful opinion on these subjects, as with a Brexit routine ribbing the supposed British insistence on honouring a commitment (“I’ve made my decision ...!”), however dire the consequences. But as satire, the show only ever flickers. More often, his topical material creaks under the weight of dodgy conceits (one routine imagines Ed Balls as our next chancellor of the exchequer) or just feels a decade out of date – like the cabaret act in character as Hans Blix, of all people.
“I’m being serious!,” he’ll bark at us, when we laugh at one or another joke. But the longer the gig goes on, the more you realise: he never really is. It’s all just gags, from wherever he can find them, and however he can deliver them. If it makes us laugh, it’s in. If that makes Schmuck for a Night feel like an odd hotchpotch, Djalili’s great skills as an entertainer (the accents, the emphatic inflections, the bonhomie, the silly dancing) amply compensate. One woman heaves, others might now and then feel queasy – but for most of the audience, it’s belly laughs all round.
At Leicester Square theatre, London, until 14 January. Box office: 020-7734 2222. Then touring.
