‘I should not be allowed to do interviews’: Nish Kumar on courting controversy and clashing with comics

The former Mash Report star’s latest show takes aim at his manosphere-courting, Saudi comedy festival-attending peers. Could he be the angry progressive standup we need right now?

Nish Kumar – mop of curly hair, Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, fancy coffee shop cookie in hand – is sitting centimetres away from me in a meeting room in his publicist’s offices in Soho, central London. Nevertheless, another comedian is drawing the eye. On the wall is a massive poster promoting Prime Video’s Last One Laughing UK – and looming over us from the centre of the frame is the show’s host, Jimmy Carr.

This feels, let’s just say, a tad ironic. In Kumar’s last standup show, he recalled the time he furiously confronted Carr about his decision to appear on manosphere influencer Jordan Peterson’s podcast. (“This is a radicalisation event that’s happening on an unprecedented scale,” he told Carr.) Then there’s the blurb for his upcoming tour, Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy, in which Kumar expresses concern that comedy has been “co-opted by charlatans in service of autocrats” – partly a reference to last autumn’s Riyadh comedy festival, where Carr performed.

Once we get on to the latter topic, there is no choice but to reference the absurdity of the setting. “He’s right here! He’s looking at us!” Kumar cackles. He’s initially hesitant to criticise his fellow comics – “All I’m thinking right now is a single phrase: you should not be allowed to give interviews” – but is soon, in his trademark hyper-articulate, mile-a-minute style, calling out Carr, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle and Jack Whitehall (“I mean, with love to him, I don’t think he knows anything about any of this stuff”) for playing a part in the “cultural-washing of a repressive regime”. He found the participation of those who have complained about cancel culture especially egregious: in order to perform at the Saudi event, some comics allegedly “signed a contract agreeing to not have a go at MBS [Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia]”, he says. “I don’t want to hear about free speech from any of these cunts again.”

Kumar’s inability to keep stumm might be his greatest asset. At school, he was an enthusiastic debater, something that patently informs his comedy, a stream of brilliant, logically watertight takes on everything from immigration to the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Yet he deals in messy millennial candour too, especially when it comes to his mental state (he has been diagnosed with PTSD and ADHD). Most importantly, though, he’s an exasperated leftwing firebrand at a time when such figures are rare – so rare, in fact, that his presence is increasingly required across the pond. Last year, New York Times critic Jason Zinoman asked if Kumar could be the angry progressive standup the US badly needs, claiming his material evoked the “spirit of the ferocious comic Bill Hicks in a way that I haven’t seen in many years”.

It’s April when we speak and Kumar has just returned from another trip to the US, where he performed his new show for the first time and appeared on the American version of Have I Got News for You. Despite his stateside success, the Londoner’s comedy remains rooted in UK concerns – the anglophiles who attend his US gigs are interested enough in British politics to appreciate material about Angela Rayner and co, he says. (Presumably they get up to speed by listening to Pod Save the UK, the weekly podcast about British politics he co-hosts with journalist Coco Khan.) Kumar has always had a clear handle on his fanbase – he brings up his longstanding description of his audience as “people who either have a paid subscription to the Guardian or the New York Times or have recently cancelled paid subscriptions to the Guardian or the New York Times because those papers are insufficiently leftwing” – but seems especially happy with his generation-spanning appeal, having recently noticed both 14-year-olds and septuagenarians in the crowd.

Kumar himself is now 40. This year marks two decades since he started standup, although his devotion to comedy dates back much further. When he was five, his uncle gave him a VHS of The Simpsons; at home in south London he would pore over the intricate references and in-jokes. Chris Rock’s standup was another major influence (“It’s a squeaky-voiced short man of colour screaming about the news”) as was turn-of-the-millennium sketch show Goodness Gracious Me. Until then, the only people he’d seen do comedy were “either white or African American. You see a bunch of Indians doing it, you think: Oh, this is viable for me.”

Still, he spent his teens sublimating his comedy ambitions through debating speeches (“They were standup sets, basically”) at grammar school in the London suburb of Bromley and in his first year at Durham university. Then fellow student Ed Gamble – who Kumar had been performing sketch comedy with – signed him up for a standup night. “After that, I was never going to do anything else.” He spent his 20s temping while struggling to get his career off the ground. “The only thing buoying me along – because I certainly wasn’t making any money or making any inroads professionally – was the persistent encouragement of my friends.” Now Kumar suspects pals including Gamble, James Acaster and Josh Widdicombe were “lying” about his comedic prowess. “They definitely were. I think they just liked having me around.”

You can see why they would: Kumar is exceptionally good company on stage and off, passionate but never pious; both appealingly self-assured and winningly self-effacing. By 2015, his persistence started paying off: his fourth fringe show was nominated for an Edinburgh comedy award and he began appearing regularly on TV. But it was two years later, after landing a job on satirical current affairs show The Mash Report, that he became a household name – and a bogeyman of the right. Question Time appearances prompted social media abuse; Piers Morgan, Andrew Neil and various Tory politicians kicked up a fuss about an “anti-British” episode of kids’ show Horrible Histories he appeared in. Then, in 2021, certain quarters of the media reported extensively on unsubstantiated rumours that The Mash Report’s cancellation had been ordered by then-director general Tim Davie as part of an attempt to correct leftwing bias at the BBC (“Nish Mash Bosh” went the Sun’s headline).

Nowadays, Kumar is rarely involved in such media storms. Is it a relief to no longer be part of the culture wars or did it feel meaningful to be involved in public debates? He doesn’t hesitate: “It’s a fucking relief. It didn’t do anybody any good; me being in the conversation didn’t benefit any of the causes that I was passionate about. I worry sometimes that it actually actively hindered them.” In 2024, he made headlines again when he participated in a boycott of the Hay literary festival due to sponsor Baillie Gifford’s ties to Israel: “I had forgotten how little I missed it.”

Kumar doesn’t need the papers to harangue him; he’s hard enough on himself. Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy sees him reckon – not for the first time – with the ethics of his job. One of the most valuable things about comedy is its ability to make scary things less so – but is that a good idea in an era when unthinkable horrors are being rapidly normalised? Then there’s the money. “Is it right that I’m financially benefiting from the collapse of the west? I’m like a disaster capitalist!”

In his standup, Kumar pokes fun at the fortunes his aforementioned friends have made from their hit podcasts, but also frequently references the wealth he has derived from his own comedy. His comfortable lifestyle hasn’t distanced him from the struggles of ordinary people, he says. Instead, it’s given him a keener appreciation of society’s failings: the only reason he’s entering middle age with a healthy bank balance is because of the “fluke” of a successful showbiz career. “My financial position is not evidence of a well functioning economy – my life is a sort of useless miracle.”

Besides, he’s not living like a superstar: “No one I know is of a level of wealth where they have transcended the mechanism of day-to-day life – that’s a Jimmy Carr level of money.” In fact, Kumar’s insistence on speaking truth to power has resulted in him turning down significant paydays – including Last One Laughing. When his agent relayed the offer, she told him the money was “really good” and that Carr was hosting. “I said to her: ‘Do you honestly think I can say yes to this given the content of what I’m saying on stage right now?’” he says. “If I’m essentially accusing him of being part of a mechanism that’s laundering fascist, misogynist ideas into mainstream discourse, I can’t then be like: Oh, Jimmy, isn’t Bob Mortimer good?!”

Integrity – much like righteous fury – is in short supply in comedy at the moment, something that makes Kumar’s indignant, incisive polemics an even more valuable part of the scene. Not that he’s willing to concede on that point: he insists he’s a gag merchant and nothing more. “All I’m ever doing is taking things that I’ve read by cleverer people and tagging a joke on the end of it.” For once, I’m not convinced.

Nish Kumar tours the UK and Ireland, 9 September to 25 November.