‘People know the content, and the characters – but they don’t know me.” Munya Chawawa’s objective with his debut standup tour is to reveal the man behind the Groucho Marx eyebrows and hot-take satirical music videos. He succeeds at that, tracing his life story from childhood in Zimbabwe to adolescence in bucolic Norfolk and beyond. But it’s communicated in slightly tentative standup, from a man whose transition from YouTube star to fluent stage presence is only partially complete.
Fair enough: it’s early days for Chawawa as a standup, and most rookies don’t develop their craft on such big stages. His flaws are to some degree redeemed by a warm, self-deprecating personality, and occasional multimedia sketches that inject a shot of what he’s already brilliant at. The first is a rap about young Munya’s enthusiasm for Harry Potter, which his mum has to deal to him like drugs behind the back of his stern Christian dad. Another gives us the origin story of his popular alter ego, the posh-boy drill star Unknown P.
Where the 30-year-old is less adept is in the autobiographical standup linking these sketches. It’s likable enough, from a man who admits he dreamed of being a TV presenter, not a comedian. Chawawa does get some comic mileage from his dual British-African heritage, disciplinarian dad and hapless love life. But it feels too much like scripted jokes strung together, a series of sometimes effortful set-ups and punchlines that lack the naturalness and seeming spontaneity of the best standup. There’s an over-reliance on puns, similes and pretend-risque jokes about Phillip Schofield and Prince Andrew – and a Nigella Lawson sketch that’s gone very stale.
There’s also a 10-minute section in which Chawawa sits on a stool to talk about the anxiety, impostor syndrome and male repression, bequeathed by his dad, that threatened to derail his showbiz career. You can admire his candour while also finding this out-of-the-blue and awkwardly integrated into the comedy. Splice the emotional honesty of this confessional into his earlier over-engineered standup, and – alongside that dream TV presenting career, surely within his grasp – Chawawa may yet become a comedian to reckon with.
