Soho Theatre Live: Nish Kumar

Nish Kumar plays a highly specific sort of stage character: an overthinking, neurotic pedant who screams his way through intellectual disagreements. He is a comedian who is deeply frustrated that the world is not behaving as logically as he thinks it should. When he is not shouting about the state of multiculturalism in Britain, he turns that exasperated gaze inward, mocking his own middle-class hypocrisy. One of the strongest routines involves a painfully awkward trip to the cinema with his father to watch the sex-addiction film Shame, a story that functions as both a great piece of cringe storytelling and an examination of his own overdeveloped sense of dread.

The show was filmed live at London’s Soho Theatre and broadcast in August 2017 as part of the first season of Comedy Central’s Soho Theatre Live series. At the time of the release, Kumar was on the verge of a major career shift, having recently signed on to host the BBC’s political comedy series The Mash Report. This recording captures his earlier touring show, Ruminations on the Nature of Subjectivity, which finds him tackling how audiences perceive non-white stand-ups and how the internet has ruined modern attention spans.

Rather than trying to pretend he is an average working-class bloke, Kumar leans heavily into his university-educated background. He spends a significant chunk of the set picking apart the inaccuracies of The Big Bang Theory, noting that the show’s geeks actually manage to get girlfriends, and analyzing the weird guilt of white liberals who claim they enjoyed watching 12 Years a Slave. He also pulls out a physical notebook to read through a list of terrible, name-based puns written by his critics. The performance is a fast, academic hour anchored by the comic’s willingness to play the fool.