Tez Ilyas’s touring show Teztify begins with a montage of news stories about Islamophobia. We get clips of the Finsbury Park mosque attack, of US white supremacist Richard Spencer. It’s strong stuff and establishes a tone of moral seriousness which it’s hard to see cheeky chappie Ilyas living up to. Then comes his opening routine, which flogs a smutty play on the word “popcorn” to within an inch of its life and makes that earlier scene-setting seem more incongruous still.
But Ilyas pulls it round. Teztify, like his 2016 offering Made in Britain, is an accomplished standup set, whose jaunty lite-ent stylings only partially conceal a commitment to defending and celebrating British Muslims. It’s framed by a story of a visit to McDonald’s in Blackburn with our host’s niece and nephew. Ilyas has just relocated to Lancashire from melting-pot London, and is ill-prepared when a fellow customer turns on him with an aggressive, seemingly Islamophobic remark.
What happens next is endlessly deferred, as Ilyas springs in and out of that framing story through disquisitions on social mobility, jokes about his hairy body and a funny number about the exclamation “Jesus Christ!” It’s digressive, sometimes clunky, and can seem arbitrary – at least until a closing section that makes retroactive sense (just about) of what’s gone before. The quality of the jokes varies wildly, too. But there are enough very good ones to keep us on side, and Ilyas’s canny way of playing the parts of his British-Muslim identity off against one another – and against us – ensure there are always little surprises in store.
The routine that really gets the gig going concerns so-called “Punish a Muslim Day”, a horrific hate-mail campaign recently targeted at UK Muslims. Showing impressive restraint, Ilyas refuses to take the document seriously, feigning enthusiasm to participate in the event, mocking the inconsistencies in its scoring system. Next, he’s addressing not his religious but his class identity, recalling his first experience of a middle-class buffet. We’re on familiar comic terrain here, but Ilyas makes it vividly his own, ratcheting up his social terror of olives, exotic cheeses and “that black vinegar that’s not for chips”. Not for the first time, I enjoyed how slyly Ilyas flits in and out of the roles of everyman and exotic other, lovable doofus and devious subversive. It’s all in the service of leaping to the defence of beleaguered British Islam, and he makes it easy to get on board – even if I demur to his claim, comic or otherwise, that women covering their hair for religious reasons is now “punk” or “cool”. Elsewhere, Ilyas is too easily tempted by weak puns, and occasionally – as with a gag about ethnic slurs cropping up in sex talk – the material can feel familiar.
A couple of routines – one about chickens, one about performing cover versions of other standups’ material – feel inconsequential and poorly integrated, until a closing section casts them both in a new light, to reveal a dystopian future for UK Muslims. It’s not a seamless piece of construction, but what results is still a powerful denouement, as the curtain is briefly drawn back on Ilyas’s dogged optimism about British Islam. Uneven though Teztify can feel, it leaves us with more to conjure with than many comedy shows, and just as much to laugh about too.
- At Duke Studios, Leeds, on 7 April. Box office: 0113-245 9487. Then touring until 25 May.
