Nish Kumar has never worried about winding people up. As one of Britain’s most prominent political comedians, the double Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee says what he thinks, whether he’s slagging off Brexit, branding himself “the brown Laurence Fox” or calling Boris Johnson a liar and a racist. In a time when politicians won’t stop banging on about all things “woke” (insert eye roll here), it’s been argued that right-wing comics are the ones sticking their heads above the parapet to receive abuse. One look at Kumar’s Twitter mentions – full of, as he calls it, “real bad stuff” – will show that isn’t the case.
Of course, if you’re going to make comedy in times of darkness, it has to be really funny. Luckily, Kumar is one of the country’s best. The Croydon-born performer was raised on political satire, from the great British panel shows like Have I Got News for You and Chris Morris’s dark comedy Brass Eye to British-Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me – stuff that, in Kumar’s words, took “serious subject matter and made it into something that was funny and palatable for an audience”.
