Comedian Nabil Abdulrashid elicited thousands of complaints joking about Black Lives Matter and a black Winston Churchill on Britain’s Got Talent 2020. All grist to the publicity mill – but the English-Nigerian standup shows he can do it away from the cameras too, with this Sunday gig in Soho. He’s the star by a wide margin of a night curated by comic Aurie Styla, himself featured on last week’s excellent Channel 4 documentary Black, British and Funny.
The argument of that film, hosted by Mo Gilligan, was that Britain has a parallel comedy scene, crammed with black talent that can’t get a mainstream break. Tonight’s lineup could hardly be more diverse, with Styla and Abdulrashid supported by comics of British-Lebanese, British-Pakistani and, er, Scottish ginger heritage. What’s notable about it – and this may be as much about class as culture – is how easy and fluid are the jokes about race and identity.
Ali Woods is the palest face on the bill, bantering about race with a majority-black crowd, without a kid glove in sight. Discussing the TV show UK Border Force, Abdulrashid roleplays an illegal Pakistani immigrant, and there’s no pussy-footing about it. You could call it unreconstructed, or you could celebrate that: if the spirit is generous and everyone agrees to laugh at themselves, these conversations don’t have to be fraught with anxiety.
That’s not to say the evening is without tension. Boozy front-row hecklers destabilise proceedings, particularly when Eshaan Akbar is on stage. I can’t blame them: Akbar uses his set to road-test Mock the Week material, and it’s very weak indeed. Then Abdulrashid arrives with a bullish half-hour on his dual Anglo-African identity and his complex experiences of racism.
Are you confident your sensitivities are in safe hands? You are not. Abdulrashid has the air of a comic who doesn’t care who he offends. But that’s not the same as being careless. Tonight’s set – with jokes about cross-cultural dust-ups at Croydon council, racial profiling at Schiphol airport and his “roadmen” pals in south London – is animated by a sardonic intelligence and sharp eye for the absurdities of racial discourse. Some BGT viewers may demur, but I found far more to cheer than complain about.
