Nish Kumar: A man of reason

Bazinga! That was the word that started it all – a catchphrase that, depending on your viewing habits, might stir giddy fandom, mild disgust or nothing at all. If you're Nish Kumar, though, it's cause to despair of humanity.

When he spotted it on a T-shirt in the crowd at last year’s Fringe, he asked the girl wearing it, what did it mean? “She said it was from The Big Bang Theory,” he recalls. “And I said: ‘I fucking hate that show.’”

That's quite an abrasive response for Kumar—to all appearances a model of good-natured, self-effacing rationality—but it’s hard to overstate how seriously he takes comedy. The US sitcom, whose cast have just become the highest-paid on TV, offends his sense of humour. Its glossy, sanitised version of socially inept scientists is an affront to this warts-and-all nerd. He’s not about to budge on that, but his inability to see why 21.3 million Americans might tune in every week got him thinking.

“There’s something interesting about starting a comedy show by going ‘you might not enjoy this, there’s comedy I don’t like – and it’s fine’,” he says. “From there the thing started bubbling.”

One year on, that thought has since sprouted legs and grown into the mockingly titled Ruminations on the Nature of Subjectivity. It’s a lively, witty look at opinion and self-doubt that undermines pigheadedness wherever it’s found. Beginning gently with the verdicts of armchair TV critics, it opens out to politics, race, and dumbed-down expression in the age of the internet troll.

“Experience gives me the confidence to embrace complexity on stage,” says Kumar, whose third solo hour marks his ninth Fringe, including stints with the Durham Revue and the Gentlemen of Leisure, his sketch duo with best friend Tom Neenan. “I started out feeling like I constantly had to explain myself, and increasingly I’ve just felt less and less need to simplify something for an audience.”

That self-assurance might never have bloomed had he taken the advice of his old agent. She told him to stop mentioning his ethnicity in case it alienated the audience. These days he’s able to laugh about it. But back then, when he was starting standup around 2007, it eroded his confidence at a time when he needed it most.

“You’re being told that you’re doing comedy wrong,” he says. “In the short term it was really damaging to me because it gave me a false view of how people perceive minority comedians.”

Rather than adapt his material, he trudged on—albeit “with 70 per cent less conviction”—and his perseverance has gradually paid off. That presumptuous meddler is now one of the villains of Ruminations, and Edinburgh audiences are relishing hearing her “profoundly unhelpful” suggestion being roundly dispatched.

Kumar has never wanted to patronise his public, and for this he credits the major influence of his formative years: The Simpsons. He calls it “the reason I started watching comedy”, and only now, aged 29, does he feel his standup comes anywhere near his favourite programme's intelligence and lightness of touch.

“People are way smarter than they’re given credit for,” he says, “and so if I just want to interpret data from a survey, as long as there’s a punchline at the end, people will go with it.”

He's referring to a new routine challenging the 34 per cent of voters who told YouGov they’d be uncomfortable with an ethnic minority prime minister. It’s signature material from a comic who’s in his element kicking out the foundations from under faulty, reactionary logic – a style that, to his amusement, has earned him comparisons to ex-Daily Show doyen John Oliver.

To his mind, that’s a ludicrously flattering connection to one of his heroes, and he would never have made it himself. (“My friends would’ve just ripped the shit out of me. I can imagine Neenan looking at me going ‘mate, what are you doing?’.”) Such a claim is unthinkable to Kumar, who, both on stage and off, likes to give himself a hard time.

“There’s two things going on here,” he explains. “One is that you stop being funny when you’re a really high-status comedian and you have all the answers. Asking questions is great, but as soon as you think ‘I’m really gonna tell you guys some truths’, that’s the end of the comedy.”

He admires more radical left-wing comics such as Mark Thomas and Jeremy Hardy, but says: “I’m not as smart as those guys, I don’t have enough of a sense of what to do about any of these problems.”

“The other side of me undermining myself is that I genuinely have a low opinion of myself. As much as it’s comedically helpful for me to play a low-status figure, I also have nothing but open contempt for myself,” he laughs.

Kumar acknowledges that it’s getting harder to sustain his self-loathing now that he’s in a stable relationship and his comedy’s paying the bills. He’s content with his lot in life, yet his parents, who always had high expectations of their bright-spark boy, remain unsure what to make of his vocation. “Every so often my dad will go ‘you’d have been a great lawyer’, apropos of nothing. I don’t even know what the fucking context is. I’ll be like: 'What are you doing?! I’m trying to watch the cricket.’”

But at long last, his mother and father have a way to set his success in context. In the past year he’s written for the Sky 1 revival of The Kumars, and was the warm-up act for BBC2’s Goodness Gracious Me Reunion Special. Nish’s parents, who come from Kerala and raised their family in Croydon, watched him being patted on the back by Sanjeev Bhaskar, an icon of British-Asian humour. Something finally clicked.

“My parents met him and he was treating me like somebody who did the same job as him. So the penny fell a little further, and whilst it’s not dropped completely, it’s in freefall now.”

Still, he can’t share with them his excitement at the milestones of a standup career. He says that when he gushes “Mum, I’m doing an opening 20 at Up The Creek” or “Dad, I’ve got a weekend at the Stand”, it’s met with a shrug. It must be frustrating for someone who takes such pleasure in his job.

His comedy obsession isn’t going to waste, though. He suspects it’s the reason why he—“a fairly straightforward act”—has found an affinity with clued-up fans with more adventurous tastes. “I am an enormous, enormous nerd,” says Kumar, who's currently on Stewart Lee's TV showcase The Alternative Comedy Experience. “And I think people are going ‘one of us made it through – good work’.”

Recently, he's noticed it’s becoming harder and harder to tell “one of us” from one of them, the phonies who “self-identify as nerds because of the proliferation of things like iPhones and Marvel movies”.

He says: “Particularly in comedy clubs, you’d walk out and the front row would be people who look like they’re in the maths club, and you’re like ‘my people!’.” But increasingly, he finds appearances can be deceiving. “Because it’s trendy to dress like people who I’d imagine I’d get on with instinctively, it means there’s a lot of arseholes in disguise,” he says. “You need to telegraph your arseholosity more clearly.”

Perhaps next time he’s out to spot an impostor, one sight should be a giveaway; he can walk on stage and skim the front row for a T-shirt that reads “Bazinga!”.