The first step to overcoming a compulsion is to acknowledge it – and this much Omid Djalili achieves with his first standup show in three years. His soul-searching is prompted by a spat with the director of Sex and the City 2 over Djalili's broad comic style. In this short set, the Anglo-Iranian star duly admits "flagging up [his] ethnicity" to get ahead and trading on stereotypes for cheap laughs. But Djalili's personal 12-step programme remains only one-twelfth complete: he pontificates about his habit, but does little to reverse it. Most of his laughs tonight derive from the usual ethnic and regional cliches.
That's regrettable, because there are moments when Djalili chafes against woolly thinking, and indicates how smart he could be. There's a potent routine about the insidiousness of the phrase "Muslim terrorist". (Why were the IRA never called "Catholic terrorists"?). But there are also sloppy gags dependent on the assumed amusingness of Welsh nationalism, say, or a clodhopper about Merseyside Muslims that goes – cue Stan Boardman-style Scouse accent – "Pray to Mecca? Which one? There's two on our high street."
The trouble isn't that these jokes about Poles and Jews are "really racist" or "not racist enough" (as Djalili captions them on an upstage screen), it's that they're uninspired. The self-conscious PC-baiting is old hat; he did it in his last show, too. I prefer Djalili's tales of his stage and screen career (even if the stories seldom ring true), and when his native daftness cuts loose. There's nothing chauvinist about his preposterous Nigerian accent, which is redeemed by the big-hearted pleasure Djalili derives from it, nor his bongo drums, on which he plays Name That (Indecipherable) Tune. I hope his soul-search is serious – but Djalili is funniest when at his most silly.
