From Birmingham to Berwick-on-Tweed, Redditch to Reading, Omid Djalili touring all over the British Isles on his current Schmuck for a Night tour. The British-Iranian comedian jokes frequently about the culture of comedy and difference in audience reactions, something he looks forward to witnessing first hand in Wales for the final month of the tour in May.
“They’re the best audiences, I don’t know what it is”, he muses on his past experiences of Cardiff and Swansea. “I take an outsider’s view. I think the Welsh probably feel like outsiders within Britain, so they immediately tune into me more than anywhere else.” He’s already looking into adapting parts of his show to suit Wales, because he has learnt that one joke does not fit all when it comes to the British Isles. Take, for example, his joke about an English superhero called Anonymous-Note-On-Windscreen Man: “they laughed at that in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in Southern Ireland, three gigs, absolutely nothing”.
Even with a month until his Welsh shows, he’s looking out for local news to parody. It’s not just local news though; Djalili as much as any comedian will tell you that Trump’s America is a goldmine for comic material. Speaking just after White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s controversial comments on Hitler’s use of chemical weapons, Djalili says that simply repeating real-life quotes can result in some of the most hilarity. “I may go onstage and start off literally by quoting what he said,” he says. “Then expand into a joke about just shooting yourself in the foot more and more. The climate is such that you can make up anything, not true but strangely plausible, playing on the fake news thing.”
This has been the case from early in Djalili’s career, when George W. Bush was in the White House. When better to revisit that period than last summer, when he produced an Edinburgh Fringe piece called Iraq Out & Loud, an entire reading of the Chilcot Report by him and many others over the space of 15 ½ days. “There were gasps when I was reading it!” he recalls. “It was a very good continuation of being the producer on [2003 anti-war demonstrations documentary] We Are Many. So it felt very natural, didn’t really change my views on comedy, but it made me very proud that the Edinburgh Fringe would choose a stomping ground for experimental ideas.”
Returning to the subject of his tour, a show he describes as like “Alan Carr hosting Question Time”, he says the promotional image of him sipping tea in a warm cardigan is something of a role reversal for him: “I used to call myself a short, fat, kebab shop owner’s son, and the whole ethos of that is there’s a tall, thin, high cheekbone English ponce screaming to get out. [In the promo shot], you see an English ponce, but a raging Middle Eastern comedian trying to get out.”
With human suffering never being the subject of his jokes, Djalili’s section of the show on the topic of cancer is the chance for him to show his serious side. “Most of what we do is focusing on serious subjects and trying to find the humour in them,” he explains. “If you can distil it in a way that sounds intelligent, then [comedians] should be talking about the serious things.” The line between comedy and tragedy is particularly poignant for Djalili, who points out how his mother was always cracking jokes just ahead of her death, which helped her live the end of her life to the fullest.
While there is an element of seriousness, Shmuck for a Night is primarily a show you can expect a lot of laughs from. Just don’t come along expecting an accurate Welsh accent. He laughs, “Whenever I come to Wales I try, but it usually ends up sounding like an Afghan who’s spent some time in Merthyr Tydfil”.
words ALEC EVANS
