In a world where big-name comics prep their tours months, nay years, in advance, then perform them over just as long a period, topicality is at a premium. Props to Guz Khan, then, whose closing routine addresses the Daily Mail’s recent objection to his stance on Israel/Palestine. It’s an outlier, mind you: the Man Like Mobeen star’s set is more about his private than public life, a tale of parenthood before and after he hit the big time, and of the delinquent tendencies he just can’t suppress in his new role as a respectable father.
That role has come about because Khan has travelled a long way – economically if not geographically – from his working-class youth. The pose struck here, of boy-done-good not quite habituated to his elevated new life (his pampered kids; the Hogwarts-like school his “babygirl” attends), isn’t a novel one, but the Coventry man wears it well. His relish for the outrageous is palpable as he stares at us with those pop eyes, relating an encounter with the Kurdish “uncle” who taught his kids the laws of the urban jungle, or – in the show’s central routine – beaming with illicit pride at his daughter’s violent vanquishing of two school bullies.
This badass daughter, her gormless brother “Lispy” and Khan’s unimpressed wife are the dramatis personae of a show stronger on storytelling than finely crafted jokes, and which our host tells us is all about honesty. I’m not sure it is: nothing feels particularly close to the bone. When the 38-year-old admits to being “two per cent racist”, it’s just to cue a gag about funny accents. Khan seems blindsided, meanwhile, when a question to his audience about their own racism doesn’t elicit the response he quite expected.
The closing section on his brush with the tabloids brings the gig closer to thin ice than anything else – but Khan doesn’t develop his thinking on the incident, raising it mainly to end proceedings on a rallying cry for Palestine. Fair enough. He’s earned the right to a soapbox by then, with a boisterous and endearing hour about this ex-reprobate’s bid to become a responsible dad.
