Shappi Khorsandi: Oh My Country! From Morris Dancing to Morrisey

“An exile is a refugee with a library.” So says a world-weary character in Zia Haider Rahman’s 2015 novel, In The Light of What We Know. By this definition, Shappi Khorsandi’s family were definitely exiles. Her dad was a poet who, in the 1970s, fled Iran with his family following the Islamic Revolution. And so, at the age of three, she began her complicated but committed relationship with the land of England.

 

Khorsandi, you see, loves England. It is why she’s on stage in Scotland, in a comedy club owned by an SNP MP, wrapped in the white and red of the St George’s Cross.

 

She makes a very entertaining fist of explaining this love. Yes, it is the land of 1980s skinheads calling her "Paki" and telling her to go home, but it is also the land of nursery teachers who called her "poppet", of anti-racism rallies and the music of Billy Bragg. Not that she lets her home completely off the hook. She contrasts the welcome her family got with the UK’s refusal to take in child refugees trapped in Calais’ notorious Jungle.

 

All of this is delivered with the lightness of touch belonging to a deft comedian. Khorsandi is a pro. Potentially heavy material is leavened with well-chosen biographical detail and domestic asides about her contrasting two children – her son, the arch English gentleman; her daughter the mad, emotional Iranian lady. Ultimately, it is a show that will make you grateful and nostalgic for that most unlikely of things: 1970s immigration policies.