Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language

and adult themes.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Good to see you all.

Good to see you all.

Lovely to see you. We love you, Romesh!

Great to see you. Good to be back.

This is the first show that I've toured

since late 2019 for reasons.

And if I had to sum up the events of the intervening period,

I would do it by telling you about two text messages

a friend of mine received. He received the first text message

in the month of March of the year of our Lord 2020.

Now, this text message was from, no judgements,

his drug dealer. (LAUGHTER)

And the message read as follows.

"We will now be doing socially distanced deliveries."

(LAUGHTER)

"Our riders will be masked at all times

"whilst maintaining a safe two-metre distance and, where possible,

"will deposit packages outside of premises.

"Because our priority..." (LAUGHTER)

"..is the health and well-being

"of our customers and employees." What does this mean?

This means a group of people whose job it is to sell drugs

had a better handle on how to manage a public health crisis

than most of the world's governments.

Drug dealers had a better idea.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

He received the second text message in September of 2022

and he received it from the same drug dealer. Of course he did.

You're not gonna let go of that kind of customer service.

(LAUGHTER)

And the second text message read as follows.

"We will now be freezing our prices

"in light of the crippling rise in the cost of living

"facing the people of the United Kingdom."

Next time you go to the polls, people,

vote drug dealers and vote often.

# Looks like another day for dreams! #

It's nice to be back. It's nice to be doing this job again.

Which feels like a weird thing to say because

most of what my job is is telling jokes about the news.

What a time to be telling jokes about the news.

The literal definition of fiddling as the world burns around us.

Feels like we're entering the endgame. Oh-ho-ho!

Climate change is all we should be talking about, right?

It's the biggest threat facing us as a species and the biggest challenge

we face within the overall challenge of climate change is how to get

conservatives to care about climate change.

I've had a think about it. I've come up with an idea.

I'm a very clever guy. (LAUGHTER)

Here's what you do. You stop referring to it as climate change or

climate crisis and start referring to it as climate immigration.

Foreign weather is coming over here,

it can't be stopped by building a wall or stopping small boats.

It's in the air, turning cold patriotic British weather

into hot foreign nonsense,

raining tikka masala down on the centre of London,

tidal waves of jerk spices sullying the once white cliffs of Dover.

Some of it's Sharia weather. (LAUGHTER)

And you have to justify telling jokes

about the news at a time like this.

You have to justify it. And here's how I justify it.

I'm trying to make myself and audiences feel better

for a moment about things that feel scary.

That's all I'm doing here. I'm not changing any minds.

You didn't come to see a political comedian

because you wanted to be challenged.

You came because you wanted to have your opinions that you already hold

reinforced in the company of like-minded strangers.

That's why you're here. (CHEERING)

That's why you came. (APPLAUSE)

I'm just trying to make us all feel better

about scary things for a moment. And that's what I think

comedy still is able to do. You can't change minds

but you can make people feel better about scary things.

That's why I tell so many jokes about racism. I tell a lot of jokes

about racism because it still really scares and upsets me.

Every person of colour you know viscerally remembers

the first time they were racially abused.

For me, I was four years old and a kid at school called me a Paki.

Now, that's a terrible word. It's a slur used against South Asians.

It was daubed on the shopfronts of South-Asian-owned businesses

and shouted at our mothers and fathers

by skinheaded Nazi thugs in the 1970s.

But, at the time, I was four years old and I didn't know

what that word meant because I'd just been at home

with my mum and my dad and my brother and we were all Indian,

so it would've been weird if we'd been racist to each other.

So when he called me a Paki, I said, "Ooh, what's that?" (LAUGHTER)

And he said, "It's a bad word because your parents are Indian."

Then I went home and cried to my mother. And that's why I tell jokes

about racism, to make myself feel less scared.

And that's why I tell jokes about the news,

to make us all feel less scared for a moment, so we can exhale.

That's what I've been doing for the last half decade,

going on stage telling jokes about the news, going on television

telling jokes about the news, going on radio telling jokes

about the news. And I'll be honest with you, it's gone very well.

(LAUGHTER) I don't wish to be crass

but complaining about racism and capitalism

has made this Paki very wealthy.

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

What a wealthy little Paki!

Go on stage, "Fuck you, white man."

Cha-ching! Another for the Faberge egg collection.

# I love being a rich fat Paki! #

(LAUGHTER) And when I did these shows in America this year,

the same show, I did it in America, and they seemed very intrigued

by the idea that we have racism in Britain.

An American friend of mine actually said to me, "What do you think

"the differences are between British racism and American racism?"

I thought for a moment and I said this.

I believe the differences between our respective racisms

are the same as the differences between our respective versions

of the television sitcom The Office.

British racism, like the British Office,

it's subtle, it's in the pocket. A lot of the time,

it's more about what's not said than what is said.

American racism goes on and on

because it has an infinite budget.

And the longer it goes on, the more it is starting

to feature increasingly incoherent celebrity cameos.

(LAUGHTER) But crucially,

as with racism and The Office, we fucking invented both, OK?

(LAUGHTER) (CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

The British invented racism, we invented The Office.

Fuck you, the Steves, be you Bannon or Carell.

(LAUGHTER) So, look, I've got a very nice career.

I make jokes about the news. I've done very well out of it.

There's one problem. Sometimes when people talk about

stand-up comedy, they compare it to jazz music.

Now I think this is largely bollocks, with one exception.

Lenny Bruce, an American comedian, one of the great early innovators

of this artform, used to perform stand-up comedy in jazz clubs.

Bebop jazz musicians, like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker,

would play jazz and then Lenny Bruce would go out and perform

stand-up comedy and, whether consciously or unconsciously,

Bruce appears to have absorbed the rhythms of those musicians.

And so if you listen to a Lenny Bruce routine now,

not what he's saying, the rhythm the words are making,

it sounds like jazz. So Lenny Bruce is the only comedian

who can reasonably be compared to jazz. Until now!

(LAUGHTER) Because my comedy is like jazz

in that, I think it's lovely but people fucking hate it. (LAUGHTER)

Oh, people fucking hate my jazz, man.

Oh, they get so angry.

And whenever I say that, people who have paid to see me,

like you, look sadly at me as if to say, "Oh, no, he knows."

Yeah, I know. I've read all the things you've read.

I've Googled myself. I've Binged myself.

I Asked Jeeves, he called me an arsehole.

I am well aware of the extent to which everyone fuck...

I've got to stop saying everyone fucking hates me.

My girlfriend said, "Nish, you have to stop going on stage

"and saying everyone fucking hates me."

Now, I think she meant the next bit to be reassuring.

It did not come out that way. She said,

"Nish, most people don't know who you are." (LAUGHTER)

I'm divisive. That's what I'll say. I'm divisive.

I'm so divisive that I can divide a single organisation.

The Times of London newspaper in the last six years has described me

as being both one of the most talented young comedians we have

and a left-leaning comedian whose stock-in-trade appears to be

biting the hand that feeds him.

Now, that second comment doesn't come from a comedy review.

It comes from an opinion piece written by a journalist

who happened to see me give a performance at an event

and he thought my performance was disgusting and offensive.

The name of the event I was performing at,

I promise you this is true, the Freedom Of Expression Awards.

(LAUGHTER)

The edgiest comedian that's ever lived,

too offensive for the Free Speech Oscars. (LAUGHTER)

And the reason that I'm written about in the papers,

which I think is weird, full stop,

But the reason I'm written about in the news and opinion sections

of newspapers is because in the summer of 2017,

I hosted a show called The Mash Report,

which was on the British Broadcasting Corporation.

It was a political comedy show. Imagine The Daily Show

but if it was weekly and had a budget of three pence. (LAUGHTER)

But we started doing the show and I worked with a group of people

that I really love very dearly, and we made a programme

that I was really proud of. And in the summer of 2017,

no-one watched it, which was fine.

Then in January of 2018, something terrible happened,

people started watching it. Clips from the show went viral

and it landed on the radar of several people who did not like it.

And all of those people had columns in conservative newspapers.

I would open conservative newspapers and see articles with my face on

that said, "Get this fucking comedy show off the television,

"it's the most offensive comedy show. Get it off the television.

"Get it off the television. Get it off the television."

"I'd turn the page and there'd be an article that said,

Is Cancel Culture Killing Comedy? (LAUGHTER)

"Have the woke left cancelled

"our ability to have a laugh?!" Then you'd turn the page.

"Get this fucking Indian man off the television.

"He's poking fun at Boris Johnson, my friend, my only friend."

(LAUGHTER)

Now, the reason that they were upset was they said

that our show was biased towards the left of the political spectrum

and, as such, compromised the BBC as a taxpayer-funded

public broadcaster's commitment to impartiality.

Now, I'm not going to get into the details

of the specific terms of the BBC's charter

but the BBC does have a commitment to impartiality in its news output.

The BBC is not required to be comedically impartial.

The BBC doesn't have to occasionally show an episode

where Fleabag fucks an ugly priest. They don't have to do that.

"Oh, the BBC, Fleabag fucked a hot priest!

"What about an ugly priest? Where is the balance at the BBC?

"What about a hot imam or a Buddhist monk

"who's all right from certain angles?"

The intensity of the coverage and its hostility increased

and increased and increased. As host of the show, I was often the face

of those articles and the negative press interest in me started

to increase and increase and increase. Then it culminated

in an incident that had nothing to do with the television show

but everything to do with the last major event

to happen in my life before the world went on hold.

On the 2nd of December 2019,

I found myself in either Park Lane or Mayfair.

If you've been there, you know it doesn't matter.

It's the same place twice next to each other.

It's the same soulless unaffordability.

For full context, the dark blue ones on Monopoly.

That's who we're talking about.

Now, the reason I was there was I was giving a performance

at a charity event in a five-star hotel organised by

the Lord's Taverners, who are a wonderful charity who do great work

providing sporting equipment to disabled and disadvantaged children.

And every Christmas, they have a luncheon

where they charge £150 to £200 a plate

and they raise thousands of pounds for the projects

that they can use to provide support and equipment

to disabled and disadvantaged children. It's a fantastic event.

There's a raffle, a silent auction and, crucially,

a comedian gives a 20-minute performance. (LAUGHTER)

And in 2019, they asked me to be that comedian.

And I said, "Oh, no."

Because I've attended that event as a guest of the charity.

I've sat amongst that audience

and in terms of its political beliefs, I mean...

(LAUGHTER)

It's very much a case of small-c and big-C cunts.

Just... (LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) Cunts. Cunts.

I know you're expecting me to say white.

Not white, red, red, red men.

I don't know what happens to rich white Englishmen

but they hit 60 and all of the blood in their body

tries to leave it by their face. (LAUGHTER)

Oh, there's a lot of men there who either have gout

or are being held in a medical state known as pre-gout.

(LAUGHTER) Listen, I like cricket as much as the next person,

I don't tend to leave the house dressed as the ball.

Oh, the man are red.

(LAUGHTER)

So they asked me and I said no because I thought

it was a bad combination of performer, material and audience.

But then I had a word with myself. I thought, "Come on, Nish,

"it's Christmas. 'Tis the season. Honky Diwali. Cracker Ramadan."

(LAUGHTER) "Do something nice."

And then I said this complete sentence to my girlfriend,

"At the end of the day, it's an unpaid charity gig

"three weeks before Christmas Day. What's the worst that could happen?"

(LAUGHTER)

24 hours later, a news story about the events that transpired

during my set at the Lord's Taverners Christmas lunch

under the headline Comedian Pelted With Bread Rolls At Charity Event,

was the number-one most-read story on several news websites.

My mother found out because my cousin phoned her from Singapore.

(LAUGHTER)

Now, listen, I'm going to tell you everything

that happened in the 24 hours between me arriving at that hotel

and me ending up in the news because it was a debacle.

It easily shot its way into my top-five worst gigs of all time.

I'll give you a flavour of the rest of that list in chronological order.

2007. Chased off stage by a Scottish heavy metal band.

(LAUGHTER) What had happened is the venue had been double booked.

I went on and it turned out the band and its fans

were not in the mood for my brand of whimsy. (LAUGHTER)

2010. Kilburn, north-west London. Look, someone threw a banana at me.

Now, this is a bit more complicated than it first appears.

I was on stage doing an impression of a bad Cockney accent,

like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. I said, "Oh, have a banana."

A man at the back stood up and shouted, "Here you go."

And threw one at my fucking head.

(LAUGHTER)

And in case you're wondering, the gig did not recover.

It's very hard to have a nice, relaxed time at the comedy

when performer and audience are thinking,

"Have we just seen a hate crime with props?"

(LAUGHTER)

2012. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this is a huge arts festival

and for comedians it's a real rite of passage because you go up there

and every day for the month of August you do the same show

in the same room, just you on stage for an hour.

And in 2012, I was doing that for the very, very first time.

And I was in a room that... There's about 350 people in here, right?

I was in a room that at maximum held 42 people. That is intimate.

Two-thirds of the way into the months, it was going pretty well,

wasn't pulling up any trees but it was going pretty well,

I walk out on stage and sat right in the front row,

exactly where you are, was none other than Victoria Wood.

Now, the younger people in the room might not understand

why there was a collective intake of breath.

Victoria Wood was a comedic icon.

She was a stand-up, an actor and a comedy writer.

She became famous in the early 1980s in England.

I was born in England in 1985. I've known who Victoria Wood is

my entire life and it's fair to say that one of the reasons

I do this job is because of Victoria Wood.

And she fucking hated me. (LAUGHTER)

She hated me so much,

at one point, she looked so angry about one of my jokes

that I saw her, got upset and my body went into what

I can only describe as a shame spasm

and I dropped the microphone.

And I don't mean it like a cool rapper way.

I mean, I said a joke. She did this, "oh!" And I went,

"Aarrgghh!" And I know you think you've had a bad day at work,

you people haven't fucking lived. You haven't had a bad day at work

until you've locked eyes with a childhood hero

as they fill with contempt. The only way it could've been worse

is if I'd walked out of the venue and got kicked in the nuts

by Raphael from the Ninja Turtles.

(LAUGHTER)

So, I walk into this hotel ballroom,

there's big banquet tables. I sit at my assigned seat.

I'm sat with comedian friends of mine. Miles Jupp was there,

Tim Key was there, Chris Addison was there.

We have a lovely Christmas lunch. Then with increasing horror,

I realise I'm going to have to go on stage and do some of my

stupid fucking comedy for jerks. And as I'm walking on stage,

I had a real moment of clarity, I thought to myself,

"I don't belong in these rooms in front of these people.

"It's a five-star hotel ballroom. There is no atmosphere.

"The acoustics are awful. It's good for two things,

"a soulless corporate award ceremony.

"and a fight between Batman and the Riddler."

That's all it's good for, right?

And also, in terms of the audience, £150 a plate.

that is not going to attract a regular cross-section

of the British public. For better or worse,

I've realised that I belong in these rooms in front of you people.

(LAUGHTER AND WHOOPING) Right?

In terms of the room, like, I selected this room

to film in because it's a theatre

but you still have to go under the ground to get into it.

That is where stand-up comedy thrives.

You're all on top of each other. We feel very close together.

Also, it smells of piss and that is just not a negative comment

on the fine people that run this establishment.

It's just... It's a basement in central London.

People have just been pissing here for...

Jack the Ripper pissed over here.

The only way you'll get it to not smell a piss

is with the assistance of an exorcist.

Like, it's that level of old piss just baked in the walls.

And I don't mean that as a bad thing.

Old piss is good for comedy.

Piss rooms were where stand-up comedy was born.

It's where it thrives. And, in terms of you as an audience,

I know you think, "Oh, you can't homogenise us, Nish,

"we're not a single group." I know you come from a variety

of different backgrounds, have a lot of different life experiences.

Let's be honest, in terms of your opinion,

there is a 3% variation in this room. (LAUGHTER)

This is a room full of people who either have a paid subscription

to The Guardian and The New York Times or recently cancelled

their paid subscriptions to The Guardian and The New York Times

because the papers are insufficiently left wing.

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE) Yeah.

You may applaud the accuracy of that observation.

This is my impression of all of you.

"I actually think it's weird that we call cows' milk regular milk."

(LAUGHTER)

"There's nothing regular about drinking

"another animal's breast milk."

(LAUGHS)

"I will have a flat white with beef milk, barista, beef milk."

Here you are, the oat-milk dickwads. Here you are.

The oat-milk dickwads of central London.

Listen, I'm not knocking you, OK?

I love you. I am you.

(LAUGHTER) You bought me a house.

(LAUGHTER)

On the mortgage application, I just wrote, "Oat-milk dickwads."

They said, "No further questions.

"If you tap that market, you're good for life."

obviously, when I perform in a basement in central London,

I'm not worried about finding oat-milk dickwads,

But sometimes my mum looks at my tour dates

and she sees that I'm going to places that she's worried about.

Sometimes I'm going to Kent if you don't know Kent,

it's a place in England where they make racism.

(LAUGHTER) They brew it in enormous vats.

It's the only thing we export anymore.

It's the last shred of our manufacturing industry.

They brew racism in big vats. They send it all over the world.

And whatever's left, we inject directly into the space

where Nigel Farage's heart should have been.

(LAUGHTER)

I'll tell you what happens when I go to Kent.

I find your equivalents in Kent. They keep themselves to themselves

because their opinions are not wanted where they live.

And then I bowl into town and I lure them out

like the pied piper of leftist malcontents.

I'm very happy performing to you. I love my career.

I love you. I love you all, right?

But I don't belong performing to millionaires in a ballroom.

Then a miracle occurred. The Lord's Taverners is a charity

that's very closely associated with the sport of cricket.

So a lot of people in that room either play cricket or love cricket.

And I told some jokes about cricket because I fucking love cricket.

Here's the thing, you're not allowed to say you don't like cricket to me

because my family is from India and cricket is basically a religion.

And so, if you say you don't like it, it's technically a hate crime.

Also... Also, here's the thing,

if you don't like cricket, you never need to say

to people who like cricket, cricket's a stupid game.

We fucking know it's a stupid game.

We know it's ridiculous to spend five days

watching one match in a sport that is the equivalent

of baseball having unprotected sex with a whole library.

We know... (LAUGHTER)

..how bad it looks when they walk out

in their white polo shirts with white trousers.

It looks like a goddamn smart-casual Ku Klux Klan rally.

We know. (LAUGHTER)

But we don't care because we love the game.

Here's how much I love cricket. I once pushed over an old woman

so I could touch Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar.

She was an old white lady. I was, like, "Get the fuck out of the way.

!This is revenge for Partition." And then...

I dived across three seats. It wasn't even a good touch.

I just brushed the hem of his garment

like I was greeting cricket Jesus. Which, in a way, I was.

And I told these jokes about cricket and they went very well.

To quote my friend, the comedian Tim Key,

the opening minute and a half of my set at the Lord's Taverners

was an unexpected triumph. (LAUGHTER)

Which, I noticed, you didn't read about

in any of the fucking news reports. No-one ever talks about

how much fun they were having on the Titanic before the iceberg.

Oh, they were having a great time

doing their impromptu life-drawing classes,

Irish jigs and car fucking. They were having a great time.

And similarly, me and the red-faced gout-boys of the Lord's Taverners

were having a wonderful afternoon.

Then, emboldened by the unexpected success of my opening salvo,

I thought, "Right, I'll mention Brexit."

Now, the reasons... (LAUGHTER)

Can I...? I'm sorry to stop the whole fucking show

but can I ask you all a question?

What is the value in that reaction?

(LAUGHTER) Do you not think I don't know that that was a bad idea?

What is it about a story that I've already told you

is one of the five worst nights of my career has led you

to sit there listening to it, thinking. "He clearly thinks

"he was a legend who made a string of correct decisions.

"We'd better warn him. Oh, no, Nish! You shouldn't have done that, Nish!"

I fucking know it was a bad idea. I am me.

(LAUGHTER)

Now, the reasons that I mentioned the British exit

from the European Union were three-fold.

Reason number one, that's just my personality.

My personality for the last six years

can be summed up by one phrase, "Buzzkill on a group chat."

Oh, I'm a buzzkill on a lot of group chats.

I'd say statistically, given that you've paid to see me,

there's a few buzzkills on a few group chats in here this evening.

People nodding, people nodding. Oh, everybody's nodding.

You know what it's like. Everyone's having a nice time

on the WhatsApp group, then you and I pipe up.

(LAUGHS) We've spent more money executing the Brexit process

than we would've done if we remained a member of the European Union,

we could've spent that difference on, I dunno, schools and hospitals.

And people will rightly reply, "That's all well and good, Nish,

"but this is Ed's stag-do and we just..."

(LAUGHTER)

"We just need to know. Laser Quest or paintball.

"That's all we care about." (LAUGHTER)

The second reason is that the 2nd of December 2019 was ten days before

a general election, there were powerful people in the room.

It felt weird to not talk about what was before COVID,

seemingly the most important thing we would ever encounter, right?

And thirdly, I really believe this. If I'm going to do

what I do 90% of my career, which is say things to people

who I know are going to agree with them, then surely,

oat-milk dickwads of the piss room... (LAUGHTER)

..you have to acknowledge, it'd be philosophically gutless for me

to be unprepared to say those same things just because

someone might not agree, right? AUDIENCE:Yeah.Yeah.

(LAUGHS) (LAUGHTER)

And they did not agree. (LAUGHTER)

For a room full of people who I think in culinary terms

would deem pepper to be a bit much, they got very spicy.

(LAUGHTER) Oh, spicy, eh? Yeah.

I thought, "Right, clearly Brexit is too divisive a subject.

"I'll make fun of Boris Johnson because even if

"you're gonna vote for him..." "What is the value in that, Nish?

You've got your fucking head in your hands.

(LAUGHTER) All of you, think about it.

Do you honestly think this is as bad as it got?

How is this going to end up in the fucking news?

Clearly, I'm building up to an incident that I'm about to tell you

in about a minute's time that I'm worried

is going to blow your head clean off.

(LAUGHTER)

I started making fun of Boris Johnson

because I thought, even if you're gonna vote for him,

we can all agree he's a ridiculous figure. Oh! They did not agree!

(LAUGHTER)

I was making fun of Conservative MP after Conservative MP

after Conservative MP. If we were to complete the Titanic analogy,

it would have been the equivalent of the captain of the Titanic

seeing the iceberg and then for some reason

calling everyone to the front of the ship and just saying,

"Fuck it, we can go through." (LAUGHTER)

Because... I probably should have mentioned this,

one of the prize items on that day's silent auction,

a signed photo of Margaret Thatcher.

(LAUGHTER)

Yeah, some of this shit was my fault.

I never said it wasn't my fault. Mistakes were made.

Sometimes in your life you think, "Well, in retrospect..."

I have to say, I should've caught that that was a bad fucking idea.

Now, there's chaos in the room.

It was 3pm. Help!

(LAUGHTER) I don't know if you've seen anarchy break out before 5pm

but let me tell you, things had gone askew.

Now sometimes, when a gig is getting away from a comedian,

what the committee will do is make a joke that acknowledges

how badly the gig is going. This might seem like

a high-risk gambit on paper but really it's quite a safe bet

because sometimes you get a laugh off that and you can pivot

back into your prepared material. We've all seen an example of this.

After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars,

he sat down and Chris Rock said two things.

He said, "This is the craziest night in television history.

"The Fresh Prince just tried to slap the shit out of me."

Now I can tell you that that is Rock, as a comedian,

drawing on decades of experience, trying to acknowledge

the weirdness that's happened and then slingshot back

into his prepared material. Now... (LAUGHTER)

..before I tell you what I said... (LAUGHTER)

This is the bit. This is the bit, genuinely hold onto your head, mate.

(LAUGHTER)

Before I tell you what I said, let's just get one thing clear,

I thought this was good. (LAUGHTER)

I said to this assembled group of people,

"Well, I guess this is what I get when I perform for a room full

"of people largely descended from people who colonised my ancestors."

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Someone heckled. A man at the back stood up and shouted,

"That was ages ago." (LAUGHTER)

That was ages ago.

Not disputing the veracity of anything that I had said,

simply arguing that the statute of limitations

has passed on the crimes of the British Empire.

Also, it wasn't ages ago, the British were in India until 1947.

India is technically younger than Paul McCartney.

And the reason... The reason people think that it was ages ago

is people in Britain don't know anything about British history.

Every so often an article will be written that says,

"Why are British actors always the bad guys in Hollywood films?"

They were the bad guys from history.

Hamilton is playing in the West End like the goddamn Usual Suspects.

"Oh, man, you're never gonna guess who the villain is."

(LAUGHTER) "Hell of a twist."

And sometimes people try and force a more honest conversation about

our country's history. These people I would consider to be patriots

because they have the audacity to imagine a better future

for our country by forcing a more honest conversation about its past.

And they do this by doing things like throwing statues

of slaveholders in lakes. I think that that is incredible.

But when it happens, people lose their mind.

"Oh, you can't throw statues in lakes.

"Oh, without statues, how will we learn anything?"

No-one has ever fucking learned anything from a statue.

When I was six years old, we managed to learn long division

without there being a statue of it in the town centre.

There wasn't a day in year-two maths where out teacher said,

"Now it's time to learn long division."

And we all marched to the middle of Croydon town centre

and just in the middle of it there's a statue of some Greek motherfucker,

and your teacher is going, "Look at it and then you will know maths."

And the statue is this Greek guy just doing this.

(LAUGHTER)

And your teacher says, "There's Euclid carrying the remainder."

(LAUGHTER)

And the reason that nobody knows anything about British history

is because we don't teach it properly in our schools.

And I know this because I studied British history in Britain

from when I was four until I was 22 years old, I did a degree in it.

This is what you learn if you study British history in Britain.

Henry VIII fucked, Elizabeth I didn't,

blblblblblblbl, Second World War. (LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Get to the part where we were the good guys.

This empire is a real buzzkill.

Anyway, back to the ballroom.

Now, at some point, someone had thrown a bread roll.

(LAUGHS) I've phrased it like that

because I didn't realise it had been thrown at me

because it was not a good throw. It had rolled somewhere

off to my right because a lot of these guys can't throw well

because they've got fucking gout of the elbow.

They left their physical peak a few centuries

and a few gallons of port ago. None of them can fucking throw straight

to save their pointless, useless fucking lives.

Say what you will about banana-man

but the cunt caught me right on the bonce. (LAUGHTER)

It was such a bad throw, I had to look into the audience,

at my stupid friend Tim Key's stupid face and say,

"Tim, did someone throw a bread roll at me?"

And he looked back at me with a facial expression

that seemed to suggest, "(LAUGHS) Yes, they did.

"This gig has gone off the rails and better you than me." (LAUGHTER)

Whenever I say someone threw a bread roll,

people always ask the same question. Did you get a good look?

Yes, I did. It was a white, crusty loaf that threw the bread roll.

Come on!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

That's just a bit of fun, everybody.

Am I not allowed to have fun? I'm at a comedy gig, too.

(LAUGHTER)

When the bread roll had been thrown, that was the organisers cue

to get me off stage. People are booing, that's a problem.

People are throwing things, you have to end the gig.

So they sent the compere back on.

I don't know why this man was dressed like this.

He'd woken up that morning and made some choices.

He was wearing a red military coat,

horse-riding trousers and no hat,

so he looked like an off-duty Beefeater

just waddling on to the stage. I didn't see him initially,

cos I was looking at Chris Addison who was having

a screaming row with the bread-roll thrower. I then turned to my left

and this Sergeant Pepper's fucker is right next to me.

And, at this point, the whole thing has taken on

the hallucinatory air of a cheese drink.

Now, the thing he said to remove me from the stage

is the worst thing anyone has ever said to remove me

from a comedy stage in my career. I don't wish to brag,

I've been removed a lot, I'm quite bad. (LAUGHTER)

And most people, to remove me from the stage, will shout,

"Fuck off" or call me a cunt. I would prefer either of those things

to what this guy said. I don't know why, it's how I feel in my heart.

Because this guy came up to me, grabbed the microphone

and just said, "Now is the time for the raffle." (LAUGHTER)

And then I ran off stage.

But the problem is, there was no dressing rooms or wings.

It wasn't a theatre. The only escape route

was that flight of stairs. There was a flight of stairs off the stage.

But when I ran off the stage, it just meant I'm stood

in the middle of the room of everyone that I had upset

who was now screaming at me in surround sound, like diving

headfirst into a swimming pool you've taken a shit in.

And, I'll be honest with you, I ran straight up to Miles Jupp.

If you don't know Miles Jupp, he's a wonderful comedian

and he's also a very good friend of mine. He's also, this is relevant,

a very tall, very posh, very white man.

And I needed cover. (LAUGHTER)

I rode him out of there like a Hobbit on an elk.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

And then we went to the pub and we had a good night.

You know what it's like? You have jobs, I assume.

(LAUGHTER) Sometimes you have a bad day at work,

you want to bury your head in the sand. Sometimes you need

to go out drinking and you need to go out drinking

with people who do the same job as you, right?

So they know exactly where you're coming from when you start moaning.

I walked into the pub, there were comedic colleagues of mine

who had been at the lunch. It was wonderful, cathartic.

I walked straight in, Tim Key came straight up to me and said,

"I bought you a pint to say sorry throwing the bread roll."

And we were all... (LAUGHTER)

It's good gear, man. It's a shame if I use it anywhere else.

And we were all having a good time, right?

And I want to make something very clear, at this point in the story,

I have no philosophical problem with anything

that happened apart from the bread roll, right?

I believe if you've paid to be in the audience at a comedy show,

you have the right to boo, right?

What you don't have the right to do is throw anything

or put hands on the performer. But what makes this exciting is

I can come and say whatever I want and you can react however you want.

I defended that audience from the Taverners gig. When friends say,

"It's evidence we're the stupidest people that have ever lived.

"We can't take any opinions that are not our own, we are so stupid."

No, people have always been fucking idiots,

especially when faced with any sort of art or performance.

In the late 19th century, the French painter Degas

unveiled his latest masterpiece, it was called L'Absinthe.

It's a picture of a drunk destitute man sat next

to a rich woman dressed in her finest clothing.

At the time, the juxtaposition of two people from opposite ends

of society's spectrum was considered so viscerally jarring

that, at its first unveiling, people booed the painting.

Can you imagine a more impotent gesture than,

"Boo, painting! You're a shit fucking paining!

"Get off the easel!"? (LAUGHTER)

At the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring,

there was a riot in the theatre because people

were angry about the chord changes.

In 1966, in the United Kingdom,

Bob Dylan did a tour that was half acoustic, half electric.

The same audience sat, clapped the acoustic half,

then, when he played an electric guitar with a full electrified band,

the same group of people booed him.

At one infamous incident in Manchester's Free Trade Hall,

a man shouted a word at Dylan. Can anyone shout that word at me now?

Judas! Judas, Judas.

Judas! The bad guy from the Bible. Spoiler alert.

Sorry, spoiler alert. (LAUGHTER)

I don't know where you've got to in the Bible. Sorry.

In 1995 at the Source Awards, Outkast won Best New Artist.

At the time, their brand of hip hop, hailing as they did

from Atlanta, Georgia, was considered so heretical

to the dominant sound of the day

that as Big Boi and Andre 3000 walked on stage to accept an award

for best new artist, the crowd booed them. The booing so intense

that when you watch the clip back, they have to wait for a moment

before starting their speech. Now that is already bananas.

What makes it even worse is the audience was largely

made up of the then warring East Coast and West Coast rap factions.

Now I know that's become a punchline now,

we say East Coast versus West Coast without thinking what we mean.

It was a blood feud that claimed the lives of Tupac Shakur

and the Notorious BIG. How askew do your priorities have to be that

you can sit in an audience, look across an aisle at someone and say,

"I'm going to fucking kill you later.

"But I think we can all agree that song is very bad."

(LAUGHTER)

So, what I'm saying is, people have always been fucking idiots.

Now I do just want to briefly address the palpable,

rising tide of concern in the room of people looking at me

as if to say, "Nish, that's all very well and good

"but, please, God, tell us you're not comparing yourself

"to Degas, Stravinsky, Bob Dylan and Outkast."

And I just want to reassure you, I fucking am.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

I fucking am. I'm the Bob Dylan of yeast.

(LAUGHTER)

The carbohydrate Stravinsky,

(LAUGHTER)

At 7:15, I was in the pub shit-faced.

Out of nowhere, I get a text message from my friend that just said,

"Hey, man, just seen the news. You OK?"

And I was like, "Oh, that's not good." (LAUGHTER)

I should definitely know why that's happened. Here's what had happened.

Someone filmed a section of the gig and passed that footage

to the newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

They put it immediately on the front page of their website.

Now, this will not be an opinion that surprises you

coming out of my mouth but fuck The Daily Telegraph.

And the reason I say fuck The Daily Telegraph is because I say

fuck everybody that pretends to be a reasonable conservative.

There is no reasonable conservatives left,

they're a delivery system for extremism, right?

It's fucking disgusting. At least the right-wing tabloids

are just open with the fact that they're completely unhinged.

If you open a right-wing tabloid, it's just like that. "Aarrgghh!

"Aarrgghh! Refugees are putting dog shit in soup cans. Aarrgghh!"

And it's like, "Yeah, we agree." But The Telegraph is still like,

"We're reasonable conservatives." The fucking Telegraph,

the fucking Wall Street Journal. It's the same goddamn shit.

It reminds me of men's magazines that were around

in newsagents when I was younger. These used to be magazines aimed at

heterosexual men and they had women on the front of them in their

underpants because we used to have to print out the whole internet.

(LAUGHTER) And some of these magazines

were very clear in their intent.

There was, like, Playboy and Hustler and Nuts and FHM

and their vibe was very much, "Tits!"

Then there was GQ magazine,

whose vibe was very much this,

(CHUCKLES)

(LAUGHS)

"Tits!"

It was the same misogyny but it was treated as classy

because it had lots of pictures of big watches.

That's all The Telegraph is. (LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) If...

The Telegraph fired a starter pistol in an unhinged race

to write about this incident. In the 24 hours after some bread

fell near me, over 20,000 words was written.

20,000 words.

Why the fixation? Well, I have a couple of theories.

One, there's a lot of basic racism at work.

There's still people in white countries

who believe that our opinions count for less and we should not criticise

the government because we don't belong in these countries.

The person who wrote the article saying that

I was biting the hand that fed me also wrote an article

about The Squad, the colloquial name given to the American congresswomen

Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar

and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He said that those women

needed to show more gratitude to their host country.

There's still a lot of people that don't count our views as legitimate.

Also, a lot of these right-wing papers and their readership

support political movements that are going off the rails

and destroying the entire goddamn world.

They have nothing that they've achieved they can talk about.

So all they're left with is their anger. That's why they're angry

with comedians telling jokes about the government,

angry with football players taking the knee,

angry about gender neutral toilets

because they have absolutely nothing fucking else to say.

Imagine being angry with a comedian

for telling a joke about the government.

What am I supposed to do, do goddamn pro-government material?

(LAUGHTER) How the fuck does that even work?

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he saw the prime minister

and he wanted to say. "Good job, little guy."

(LAUGHTER)

Knock, knock. Who's there?

The government. I love you.

(LAUGHTER)

They have sprayed shit everywhere and they are trying to distract you

from asking why the house smells. That's all that is going on here.

What is the real scandal in this situation?

That a comedian told some jokes mildly critical

of the government or in a country that is the sixth richest

on the entire fucking planet, people don't have enough food

to feed their children and other people have so much food

they can afford to throw it at comedians

whose jokes they don't like? What is the real scandal?

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Now, what happened in the 24 hours after something like this happened

is that it starts being covered in the papers.

Then it goes to the fringe right-wing lunatic websites,

then it goes to the real fringe,

the, like, mad Nazi YouTubers, right?

And the problem is that it's a story about a story about story.

So it keeps getting further and further removed from the truth.

So by the time I was reading about me having some bread thrown near me

in a five-star hotel ballroom, it was reading like science fiction.

I was reading things like this. It was a cold winter's afternoon,

a group of humble, white working-class Brexit-voting

coal miners had assembled at a nearby shack

in London's poverty district.

Their aim, to have a traditional white working-class English

Christmas lunch of offal and balls of their own mashed hair and tears.

In strode Nish Kumar, the English Fidel Castro. He was smoking a cigar

and stroking his beard. He strode to the front of the room.

"Everyone who voted for the Conservative Party,

"hands in the air." Trembling white working-class hands went up

like a scene from Billy Elliot. He said, "All of you

"will be sent to the gender-neutral gulag."

(LAUGHTER) One of them got down on his hands and knees

and tried to plead with Kumar, who simply laughed communistally.

(LAUGHTER) The man said in his most white and working-class accent,

"Oh, Mr Kumar, we're just a bunch of white working-class Brits,

"we're not doing anything, Mr Kumar, just trying to have a traditional

"white working-class English Christmas lunch with offal

"and balls of mashed hair and tears.

"No racism, Mr Kumar, just nobody, no racism.

"Love Island. Love Island. Cheeky Nandos. Love Island."

(LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Now, the big problem is that by the time you get to this stage,

the thing that is also coming in is the death threats.

It would not be a surprise to you to know that people

in the public eye get death threats. It also won't be a surprise

for you that the number of death threats you get is multiplied

exponentially by the number of factors that diverges you

from what we as a society deem to be the norm.

What do I mean by that? You know what I mean.

Rich, white, cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied men.

If there's any tonight, congrats, my brothers, you won history.

That's not to say that those people don't get death threats.

They do. It's just the number of death threats you get

is multiplied by any adjective you can put on the front of your name.

If you are poor then you get... that's your factor.

I'm actually all of those things. I'm a rich, straight,

able-bodied man, but I'm brown. So brown is my factor, right?

You understand that a Chinese disabled transgender lesbian,

every one of those things multiply the number of death threats

that person receives. And, obviously, it's very easy for us

to get death threats now because we all have social media.

We've got an open sewage door that is piling into our lives, right?

And we all need to get off social media.

For some of us, it'll be good for our mental health. For others,

it'd stop us from being radicalised or buying shit we don't need.

For others of us, it's about basic human dignity.

I say this with all love. If you are 30 years old or above,

you must delete TikTok and Snapchat from your phones

as soon as the show is over, you must delete it

for reasons of your own dignity. I know a 36-year-old on TikTok.

Why are you on TikTok? You're two whole people who can vote.

You're 36 years old. No-one needs to see you

lip-synching to Megan Thee Stallion. No-one needs that.

Everyone over 30 on Snapchat is a sex pest.

I really... (LAUGHTER)

I really believe that. I think if you're over 30 and on Snapchat,

you should immediately be added to the sex offenders register.

People should find out about you when they buy a house in your area.

Every time you go past the school, your phone line should go off.

Berrr! Berrr! Berrr! Snapchat sex offender. Berrr!

Throw a tarpaulin on the kiddies! Berrr!

(LAUGHTER) If you don't know what Snapchat is,

it's a photo-sharing app and you can send photos

on the app and then the app spontaneously deletes them.

What do you think people use it for? They use it for pictures

of their penises and vaginas. And if you're 23 years old

and you're sending it to another consenting 23-year-old,

have at it with your box-fresh genitals.

No-one needs to see your 40-year-old penis, mate.

No-one needs to see your penis that remembers

the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man.

(LAUGHTER)

No-one needs to hear your 39-year-old vagina's

tragic rendition of # Coming out of my cage

# And I've been doing just... #

(LAUGHTER)

There is no bright side.

(LAUGHTER)

And it's people my age, that's what I'm having a go at,

people my age, we're the worst people on the internet.

That's not true. We're not really the worst people on the internet.

I was being polite. We know who the worst people on the internet are.

It's everyone over 60 on Facebook, a generation of people

who fell for scam emails and then voted for the human equivalents

of scam emails. They fucked everything up for everybody

and they don't seem even vaguely sorry about it.

Obviously, if you're here and you are over 60...

Not you. ..but can we agree, your friends shat the bed?

So, for 24 hours, all that's coming in is death threats,

news stories, weird phone calls from unlisted numbers that are

journalists trying to get you to participate in talk-radio

discussion programmes about whether or not you're an arsehole.

Then, after 24 hours, everything stops. They all forget about you,

move on to the next person they're gonna bully

and you have to pick up the tattered remnants of your life.

Now, luckily, the next day I was distracted

because I had to leave my house. So I wasn't sat there

just obsessively hitting refresh on my computer.

I had to leave the house because I was going to Manchester

in the north-west of England to do another charity gig

because I'm a fucking great guy.

(LAUGHTER) (LAUGHS)

I might be the best man that's ever lived.

(LAUGHTER) Think about what I was going through.

I was getting death threats. I could have cancelled,

I said, "No, the charity needs me."

Luckily, that gig was for Amnesty International.

(LAUGHS) Piece of fucking piss.

Me at an Amnesty gig. I walked out and everyone's like...

Uugghh! Uugghh!

All the women were rubbing their clitorides.

They were arcing jets of jism, all genders, coming at me.

And I was taking it square in the mouth like Tim Robbins

at the end of Shawshank Redemption.

I'd come off stage covered in jizz.

And I got a death threat that concerns me more than the others.

The first thing to say about this death threat,

it came through Facebook, old school. I think if someone sent me

a death threat through MySpace, I'd be more excited than anything else.

I'll be like, "Wow! I didn't even know this was still a thing.

"Is it from Tom? I thought you were dead, big man."

(LAUGHTER) Now, the reason it concerned me...

Some of you actually down the front will actually be able to see this.

The reason it concerned me is that it had arrived anonymously.

It just came from Facebook user, right? No name.

Now, that suggested a level of deliberation

that I will admit rattled me somewhat.

Quick question. Why is that a feature?

Someone please ask Mark Zuckerberg, aka,

the incel Lex Luther now... (LAUGHTER)

I am going to read this death threat out. Full disclosure.

Bad stuff. I don't think there is a good death threat.

Even if you start "Dear sir or madam" and end "yours faithfully,"

the content is going to knock some of the shine off the apple.

But this is particularly bad, every possible content warning because

it's all in here. I'm reading it out for two reasons. Reason number one,

I do think there is some value in, especially white audience members,

hearing what some of your uncles are saying.

And secondly, there is a motherfucker of a twist

at the end of this thing. Oh, you are not gonna see

the last two lines of this death threat coming.

This is like a death threat by M Night Shyamalan.

Oh, my God. What a twist.

But the beginning is bad.

"I will find you at a gig and set you on fire,

"you retarded immigrant Muslim piece of shit.

"I have a message for all you Muslim child-raping cunts.

"Go and kill your parents, kill your kids to stop them becoming

"terrorists, then kill yourself, you fucking baby-raping Muslim cunt.

"Get the fuck out of my country, you snivelling retard."

Bad. But then the twist.

"Reported your comments to the police."

(LAUGHTER)

What's happening?

So I immediately take a screenshot, which, by the way,

is this same screenshot. I read it out every night

because I refuse to learn my own death threats.

I don't think that's unreasonable.

But, in order that I'm not faffing around with my phone,

do you know what I had to do? I had to favourite that screenshot.

(LAUGHTER) Do you know how damaging it is psychologically

to have to read that and then go, "Mmmm! Heart!"

(LAUGHTER)

Also, if you want to know the extent to which specifically

anti-Muslim racism is just part and parcel of the way

people speak to each other on the internet, consider this.

I get a huge amount of Islamophobic racial abuse. Huge.

And I am a shit Muslim, oh, shit Muslim...

Hindu. (LAUGHTER)

You understand? It doesn't get worse than there being a Muslim state

than being a Hindu. Islam is an Abrahamic religion

like Judaism and Christianity. They have a huge amount

of theological overlap and overlap in their day-to-day practice.

If you're a good Jewish person, you are closer to being a good Muslim

than I will ever be because Hinduism could not be further away

in its theology or in its basic daily routines.

Think about how I start every day. I wake up and give thanks

to hundreds of gods who I then celebrate with a bacon sandwich

and a tug on my foreskin. (LAUGHTER)

So I took a screenshot of this death threat.

I then sent it to my agent. She immediately phones me

in a tone of voice with which I'd become incredibly familiar.

"OK, Nish, we're just going to be very calm."

(LAUGHTER)

"And we're going to have a quick chat with the police."

So the next day, I go back down from Manchester to London.

I go to a windowless room in the back of my agent's office

and I sit and have a meeting with a policeman.

And this man was very thorough. He wanted to know every single thing

that had been said to me. He wanted to know who had said it and he

wanted to know everything I'd said on stage at the Lord's Taverners.

Earlier, the more statistically minded amongst you

will have noticed that I said I was going to do a top-five list

of my worst gigs and then I only did three.

I will now complete the list of my top-five worst gigs of all time.

At number four was the bread roll,

at number five, in chronological order,

but number one in terms of the worst gig I have ever

or will ever do in my entire career, or indeed any comedian

will ever do in their entire career was two days after the bread roll

when I had to repeat every single thing I said on stage to a single

unsmiling policeman taking notes for a statement. (LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

(WHOOPING)

Yeah, you can whoo it now.

Some of that would have been useful at the time.

Richard Pryor would have eaten shit at that gig, man.

The worst thing is occasionally he would just repeat something

back to me that I'd said and then leave it hanging in silence.

"Colonised my ancestors."

"That was ages ago."

(LAUGHTER)

Now, what I want to tell you is that I moved on.

I was absolutely fine and I never thought about it again.

That's what our mums tell us, when I was four, my mum said,

"If somebody is racist to you, get on with your life.

"You show you're a better person than them by living well."

But, for some reason, I couldn't move on from this.

I was not OK, even a year later.

Full disclosure, I didn't know that I wasn't OK.

My girlfriend said, "Hey, I don't think you're OK."

I said, "Why do you say that?" She said, "Oh, you cry a lot."

Inside Out is a sad film, but not when you're a 36-year-old man

who's seen it five times before and is now just reading

the Wikipedia plot synopsis. (LAUGHTER)

She said, "You need to see a therapist." And I refused,

which is so hypocritical of me because I do so much work

for mental health charities for free because I'm a fucking great guy.

(LAUGHTER) I might be the best man that's ever lived.

Sometimes the charities say, "We have a fee we can pay you."

I say, "No, The crazy people need it."

And the reason they always want me... (LAUGHTER)

The reason they always want me, people like me,

is because men of colour disproportionally don't go

and seek mental health support. So I guess they figure

if they get a bunch of us to talk about it, it will improve numbers,

but it's clearly not doing it. I couldn't even do it for myself.

Apparently, I was just walking round going, "Men of colour,

"please get help, there's no shame in it."

But in my head I was thinking, "But not me." (LAUGHTER)

"Not me. I'm the greatest man of colour that's ever lived.

"It goes me, Muhammad Ali and Blade from the film Blade." (LAUGHTER)

Eventually, in a pincer movement between my girlfriend,

and the comedian and actor Brett Goldstein, my dear friend,

they tricked me into going to therapy.

Brett emailed his therapist with me cc'd in

and the email just said, "This is Nish, he needs help."

(LAUGHTER)

Having been unwilling, I was uncooperative.

For the first three weeks, she set me homework and she'd say,

"Have you done the homework?" "No, I haven't fucking done the homework.

"I'm not here to work. I'm here to be worked on.

"Cast your spell, mind witch."

(LAUGHTER)

Eventually, she boiled my homework down to one form.

It's a PCL-5 form. It's a negative-mood-indicator form.

It asks you questions about negative moods.

It says, "Are you angry? Are you stressed? Are you upset?

"Are you depressed?" You rank those moods one to five.

One being not all, five being "I'm feeling this quite a lot."

And I was feeling it in dog shit. # One, one, one, one, one, one, one

# One, one, one, one, one! I'm Nish, I'm the best. #

After three weeks of this horse shit, she lost her temper.

Do you know how far you have to push a mental-health professional

before they lose their temper?

She said, and this is a direct, verbatim quote.

"You are filling in these forms aspirationally."

(LAUGHTER)

"I am asking you how you are feeling

"and you are telling me how you wish you were feeling."

I said, "Why is that a problem?" She said, "What do you think

"I'm treating you for?" I said, "I dunno, man, bad vibes?

"I don't know, my mind is suboptimal."

She said, "I'm treating you for post-traumatic stress disorder.

"You are exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD." And when she said that,

my first thought is something I will always be embarrassed by.

My first thought was, "Oh, Kumar, you fucking pussy!"

Oh, I got shell shock from a bap. Now, the reason that I thought that

is my understanding of PTSD was fundamentally flawed,

based as it was on some films and that one West Wing episode.

All that happened is that I believed the death threats.

I believed that that was going to happen and I internalised the trauma

of that threat and I was constantly reliving it.

So, five or six times a day for a year, I was imagining

what was going to happen when I was assassinated.

And I didn't realise that that was weighing down heavily

and fundamentally warping my entire personality. Now, for some reason,

as soon as she said PTSD, something snapped in my head and I was like,

"Oh, I need to take this seriously." It's a very mild case.

Soldiers have it severely, victims of childhood sexual abuse

have it severely. I've got the PTSD equivalent of scraping your knee

but if you don't deal with a scraped knee it can fuck up your life.

And now I'm in it and I feel much better.

It's been a really helpful process to me. And I go to therapy

every single week and I'm embarrassed by my reluctance.

If I was trying to make excuses, I would say,

I wasn't really brought up in a therapy-supportive culture.

I was born in England in the mid-80s and if you remember England...

Now we're like, "We should talk about our mental health."

in England in the fucking 1990s, if someone said,

Hey, should we talk about our mental health? Someone else would say,

"Why don't you shut the fuck up and drink some gin, you cunts?"

Like that. (LAUGHTER) That's where we were at with it.

Also, I'm Indian, my parents are Indian,

and that's not really a culture that has been historically supportive

towards chats about mental health. You can't go to your Indian parents

and say, "Should we see a doctor about my mental health?"

Because they'll say, "No, we don't see doctors, we be doctors."

(LAUGHTER)

But those are just excuses that I'm making

because I was reluctant to do it and I'm embarrassed by that, right?

Now I'm doing it, she says things to me that challenge me and make me

think about the world in a different way. Sometimes she says things

and I have no way of answering them. She said this,

"You seem to have a very low opinion of yourself."

Now I ask you, oat-milk dickwads of the piss room,

how is it possible as a human being

to not have a low opinion of yourself

when you know all the things you've thought?

How is it possible to not have a low opinion of yourself?

(APPLAUSE) How do you do that?

When you know how many times on any given week

because someone is being slow in the queue in a supermarket,

you think, "I hope you fucking die later."

(LAUGHTER) "I hope you fucking die

"and I hope the way you die is get run over by a bus

"filled with all your family, so they never process

"the shame of murdering you flat as a pancake,

"you, six-items-in-the-five items-or-less-queue cunt!

"Can't you read?" You know all the lies you've told,

not just the big lies, the small lies that you tell every day

that your brain tells you off for telling as you're telling them?

Why are you telling people you've read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles?

You've never read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles.

Why does it matter if you've read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles?

What are you going to do if someone says,

"What is the plot of Tess Of The d'Urbervilles?"

"Oh, there's this girl, Tess, and let me tell you,

"this bitch is of the d'Urbervilles." (LAUGHTER)

"You think you've seen people be of the d'Urbervilles before,

"you've got to get a look at this Tess. My God."

But obviously, clearly, based on what's happening,

that's not my only problem. Clearly, I have a low opinion of myself

and also a high opinion of myself and I bounce between the two.

I didn't know there was some of you motherfuckers

that weren't living like that. I didn't know that it was possible

to be a person and not some days wake up in the morning and think,

"I'm of such little value that I don't deserve to be alive."

And by 4pm, be thinking. "I wonder which Nobel Prize I'll win."

(LAUGHTER)

Is there a Nobel Prize for being a great laugh?

Because I'm a great laugh. (LAUGHTER)

I can't deny that my high opinion was not part of the problem here.

My high opinion of myself led me to believe those death threats,

because, this is probably the worst thing I have to say to you

at any point this evening, which, bear in mind,

some of the things I've already said to you...

I... Look... (LAUGHTER)

There is a part of me that believes

and has always believed maybe

that I am of such cultural and historic significance

that I will be assassinated. (LAUGHTER)

There is truly a part of me that believes one day

it will be Malcolm X, Martin Luther King...

"Nish? How did you get on there, buddy?"

Cut down in his prime like a chunky Gandhi.

(LAUGHTER) Two hours after I got that death threat,

do you know what I was doing? I was sat in a hotel room in Manchester

and I was thinking to myself, "Well, I mean,

"I assume there'll be a documentary." (LAUGHTER)

In my head. I was mentally making a list of friends of mine

that would contribute, comedians, Aisling Bea will do it,

they'll get Romesh Ranganathan on Asian guilt.

There might even be a Kumail Nanjiani. Asian guilt is powerful,

it can cross the Atlantic, man.

The person they have to get is Ed Gamble.

Ed Gamble is a comedian and he's a very good friend of mine.

And if I'd been assassinated in December 2019, it would have meant

that I wouldn't have been able to be at his wedding

three months later when I was the best man.

And I sat there in this hotel thinking,

"If I get assassinated before Gamble's wedding,

"when I'm supposed to give the best-man speech

"and he has to do a talking head about it in a documentary...

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

"..that's going to be the fucking money shot.

"Gamble weeping like a bitch,

"just diabetic tears rolling down his face."

He's got diabetes. Diabetic tears.

(CRIES) "Oh, he was such a beautiful man.

(LAUGHS) "I know he was my best man but maybe he was THE best man.

"Forever in his honour, I will only choose poppadoms never bread."

(WHOOPING AND APPLAUSE) Don't fucking whoo! Shut the fuck up!

How dare you whoo that podcast?

If you don't know why people are cheering,

Ed Gamble and James Acaster, two of my best friends,

host a podcast called the Off Menu Podcast,

where people come in and talk about their favourite food.

It is... And I cannot stress this enough, the ultimate exercise

in white-male privilege. I'm out there getting death threats,

these motherfuckers are making bank talking about

dinners we have once enjoyed. It's a bunch of crackers,

talking to other crackers about eating crackers.

And the first question they ask is, poppadoms or bread?

Firstly, it's pappadoms, motherfucker.

Secondly, secondly, if you pick bread out of those two,

you're a racist. I believe that. I think you're a goddamn racist.

Abd if you're wondering, are these...?

Ed Gamble and James Acaster, if you are wondering,

"Are these two white?" Oh, they're white!

White with a capital W and a capital H.

This pair are honkies. My God.

Acaster is so white, it's like someone

threw a corduroy jumper on a ghost. (LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

And Gamble. Oh, Gamble!

Looks like a goddamn Disney prince before they remembered about racism.

(LAUGHTER)

Anyway, the important thing is I'm doing much better. (LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Look, I feel much better,

I'm doing well and I'm on this sort of mental-health journey now,

which a lot of us are on. It's, you know, it's nice, you sort of learn

stuff about yourself. And I was trying to work out why it is...

My therapist is so patient. She puts up with stupid questions from me.

I was trying to ask her why it is she thinks I had this PTSD episode?

She said, "You were on the end of an unpleasant racialised hate campaign

"in the press. People sent you death threats, that will leave a mark."

But she said separate to that, "I really think you need to embrace

"the fact for your mental-health journey that you have always had

"some level of mental-health problems. There's always been

"some level of anxiety and depression in your brain,

"that's the way you were wired since you were a teenager.

And I said to my girlfriend, "Hey, can you believe she said

"I've always been mentally ill?" And she said, "Yeah."

(LAUGHTER) "Yeah, I can, mate."

And I said, "Why do you say that?" And she said, "Can you remember

"what you were like when we first started going out?

Now, the truth is, I can't. We've been together for ten years.

We're not gonna get married because she has a feminist objection

to the institution and it turns out oat-milk dickwads move in pairs.

But... (LAUGHTER) ..we have been together

for ten years, or, as she keeps saying, "Enough."

(LAUGHTER) She's saying, "Enough now, innit? It's enough now."

I keep saying, "What will you do if we break up?" What will I do?

We've been together ten years. We got together when I was 27

and she was 23. Neither of us had a relationship before this.

At this point, we are each other's first and only loves.

Our relationship now is like a prison sentence

that we both served together and, if released from it,

statistically, all we're likely to do is re-offend

to get back inside. Besides that, if we do get married,

those will be my vows. (LAUGHTER)

She said, "Remember what you were like when we started going out?"

I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "You couldn't sleep.

"Do you not remember? You couldn't sleep for days, weeks, months

"if you had something going on in your work life or personal life."

I've been in a relationship for ten years, I've learned one thing.

If there's two people in a relationship, regardless of

the sexual orientation or the gender identity of those two people,

one of you is good at sleeping and one of you is bad at sleeping.

And every time that happens, exactly what happened

on the front row happened here where she just turned and looked at him.

At the speed at which you two turned to look at each other,

it was almost as if you'd planned that before the gig.

Also, it's pretty funny because you look like I drew

audience members of mine.

This guy's wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt and he's an adult.

You could not be more in the middle of my core demographic.

(LAUGHTER)

Every time I see a couple react like that,

where you look at each other and you relate to the material,

you know what dawns on me? It dawns on me that finally,

after 15 years of doing stand-up comedy,

I've got one workable piece of observational material.

(LAUGHTER) Because my comedy is great, it's not relatable.

I can't come out here like Jerry Seinfeld and say,

"Hey. What is the deal when someone throws a bread roll at you

"and you become the figurehead of a conservative hate campaign?"

What? But this, you guys really related.

Which one of you is good at sleeping and which one is bad?

I'm good at sleeping. Not a scientific study.

I will say, every single time I've asked, I ask in an open-ended way,

which one is good at sleeping, which one is bad at sleeping?

The person who's good at sleeping goes, "I'm good at sleeping.

"Oh, I'm so good at sleeping.

"Look at how well-rested I sound. Mmmmmmmm!"

Meanwhile, the person who is bad at sleeping is going.

"Uugghhh! (SNORES)

"(WHINES) I've had 50 coffees today

"and if I have another one, I'm gonna die."

Listen, you piece of shit. (LAUGHTER)

You're not better than her and you're not better than me.

People who are good at sleeping, you're not better than us.

You don't have less anxiety than us either,

you just process it at a different time of day.

My girlfriend walks around all day like this.

"I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I said that in 1997.

"I can't believe I said that." Then it's time for bed.

It's like someone flipped a switch and she powers down.

I walk around all day like this. # A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam!

# I'm Nish and I'm great

# I'm Nish and I'm great whoo! I'm Nish and I'm great...

Go to the supermarket. "I hope you die." # I'm Nish and I'm great

# A-wop-bop-a-loo-wow a-lop-bam-bam! #

Then it's time for bed and all I can think is,

"I've go to read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles." (LAUGHTER)

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

I told three people today that I've read Tess Of The d'Urbervilles.

One of them didn't even ask. (LAUGHTER)

Just kicked in the doors of a bookshop and said,

"Hey, guess what book I've read." (LAUGHTER)

(LAUGHTER)

Anyway, I've got to be very careful here

because twice on the tour, I split these trousers...

(LAUGHTER) ..executing that very move.

It was bad. You don't want to split them again.

Because when I split in the second time, I took them to my dry cleaner

and he just went, "Again?" (LAUGHTER)

There's sometimes a point when you split your trousers,

as someone with testicles, and you feel air on your balls

and you go, "Yeah, I've split my trousers."

It's not... If you feel air on your penis,

it's because you took out your penis.

I assume it's the same for the vulva. You're wearing a skirt,

there's a point where the wind changes and you go,

"I shouldn't have been able to feel that." (LAUGHTER)

And it's definitely not where I should've been able to feel it.

So, look, the important thing is, I feel much better, I'm doing OK.

Right? And I didn't really know why I was talking about this

at all on stage, other than I'd booked a tour.

I did the gig in London, my family lives in London,

so a lot of my family were at that gig and my cousin's wife was there.

She said, "It's nice to see you do a show that's about something."

And I said, "Er, do tell."

(LAUGHTER) "Why don't you say what you think it is

"and I'll tell you if you're right. (LAUGHTER)

She said, "It feels very clear that the show is about you

"trying to tell people that there is an emotional toll to racism."

We talk about it as a thing that affects our employment prospects,

we talk about it as a sociological phenomenon, we don't talk about

the fact that it takes an emotional toll on people.

And hopefully what keeps this the right side of comedy is I am a very

resourced person and I was able to pay for mental-health-care support.

All I'm inviting you to imagine is that there are a lot of people

equally affected by racism who don't have access to the funds I have.

That's all I'm trying to say because I'm absolutely fine.

The BBC did cancel The Mash Report because they said

they'd run out of money, then the next day The Sun newspaper

said that they had cancelled it because the director general

was trying to get rid of the left-wing bias at the corporation.

We asked the BBC if they would clarify that that wasn't the case.

So far, to date, no-one has done so.

Now that felt like a bitter pill but what made it sweeter

the headline, "Nish-Mash-bosh!" (LAUGHTER) And you have...

You have to say fair play. Come on.

I don't like The Sun any more than any of you do...

(WHOOPING AND APPLAUSE) ..but you have to say.

Look how much... Jesus Christ.

(LAUGHTER) What the fuck is that?

How bad has that been?

What? You are just nodding at me?

(LAUGHTER) How bad can that be?

"Oh, very bad."

Look at this shit. (LAUGHTER)

I'll tell you what it is, it's not sweat.

I lactated oat-milk... (LAUGHTER) ..for you,

my children. (APPLAUSE)

Suckle at my teat.

We can CGI that out, right?

No? (LAUGHTER)

But broadly, ultimately, I'm absolutely fine, right?

The show got cancelled but that freed me up to do

more lucrative work for commercial channels.

So like everyone who's been cancelled recently,

it's been very good for my bank balance, right?

And, ultimately, all I've come away from this with

is a bit of perspective. Like, I've just got a different perspective

on my career, I've got a different perspective on my mental health.

I've also got a different perspective on the bread roll,

certainly than a lot of people seem to have on the internet.

Every time I announce something like this tour,

all that happens is five people immediately comment underneath.

"Don't go and see this guy. He's a shit comedian.

"He got hit by a bread roll."

That's not how I see it. Here's how I see it.

I'm such a good comedian that when I have a bad gig, it makes the news.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

So, look, I'm going to be OK.

We might not be OK. (LAUGHTER)

That's the thing that concerns me at the moment.

We might not be OK. I don't know what's going to happen.

I don't know if we're about to tip into full fascism.

Maybe we're on the precipice of a dawn of some great

socially progressive revolution. It's hard to say at this point.

There's a lot of conservative movements that have hacked

arcane democratic systems and they're able to win elections

without the majority of the population actually voting for them.

And it's a difficult situation to be in.

Who knows if we're going to be on the dawn of some

socially progressive revolution? It seems like

the demographics are tipping that way.

But, at the same time, as much as everyone says

the right and the left have nothing in common, that's not true.

The right hates the left and the left hates the left.

But sometimes... (LAUGHTER) ..I do feel like things

might be about to get better because whenever these conservative

authoritarian rulers come to power, the first two things they do,

clamp down on our ability to protest and on our ability to vote.

That suggests to me that they are afraid of us

because there are more of us than there are of them, right?

Also, if there are not more of us than there are of them,

then why do all adverts now sound like this?

"Our diversity is our strength." (LAUGHTER)

"Where you come from or who you love should never stop you from living

"a life filled with dignity, joy and respect. Eat ham!"

(LAUGHTER) What the fuck has this got to do with ham?

If corporations are pretending to have consciences, maybe that's

a good thing because they're worried it affects their bottom line, right?

And I really don't know what's going to happen next.

All I know is, I'm now character in some sort of culture war

that I didn't ask to be inculcated into.

I occasionally just crop up in the press as a distraction tactic.

Sometimes it's because it's something I've said,

sometimes it's because the wind's changed and The Mail is in a mood.

Who knows why, like athlete's foot,

it just flares up every so often, right?

The only time it really upset me was because of what was said

rather than the fact that it was being said.

I presented a clip from a children's television show

that had already been on television but when it came out

with me presenting it, there was a shitstorm

and a journalist called Andrew Neil,

not a journalist, a cunt called Andrew Neil...

(WHOOPING AND APPLAUSE) If you don't know him, he's the, um...

He's the absolute patron saint of red-faced men.

Oh, man! This motherfucker is walking around looking like

goddamn Hellboy in the streets, it's unbelievable.

(LAUGHTER)

He described what I'd done and what we had done as being anti-British.

I don't hate Britain. I'm not against Britain.

I am against nationalism and I'm against...

I'm against nationalism in India. If you don't know,

India is run by a cabal of Hindu nationalists led by Narendra Modi

and the BJP and they're fucking arseholes

and they run the country along this principle.

Hinduism is the best, which I disagree with politically.

In terms of religion, I do agree with it unfortunately.

I'm not going to start a religious war. All I'm saying is

if you're Jewish, Christian or Muslim... (SNORES)

..your fucking religion is boring.

Ooh! We've got one god. We've got 75 and some of them are blue,

it's like the X-Men, it's incredible. (LAUGHTER)

I hate conservative nationalists. I hate nationalists of all stripes,

to be quite honest with you. Love your country if you want,

just don't be an arsehole about it. Here's what you must never say,

here's the dividing line. You can say, "I love my country."

You can't say, "I live in the greatest country in the world,"

because that is always followed by, "So we should run other countries."

Also, you don't live in the greatest country in the world

if the majority of your population still uses toilet paper.

I don't know if you've sat on a Japanese toilet recently

but you can basically call in a drone strike on your own arsehole.

It's unbelievable. You can aim a jet of water

at the temperature of your choosing into the specific position

of your back passage. And then, after it's washed your arse,

it dries it while singing a little song.

That's the greatest country in the world if anyone is.

Meanwhile, we're here, # Rule Britannia

# Britannia rules the waves. #

What other form of cleaning involves wafting tracing paper near the mess,

just smearing shit all over our arseholes and then pulling up

our trousers and pants going to the post office like it's fine?

Every country that uses toilet paper is just slow-moving queues

of shit-smeared arseholes saying that they live

in the greatest country in the world.

(LAUGHTER)

That's why I hate all nationalistic symbols.

Nationalism is a prison, it stops us from getting better

because we already think we're the best.

How can you improve if you already believe you're number one?

I hate all the symbols of nationalism, even the benign ones.

I hate all national anthems and I think, honestly,

if you're an adult and you sing national anthems,

you should have your vote taken off you. What are you,

a fucking toddler? Change your nappy and grow up, you fucking idiot.

Imagine explaining national anthems to someone

who'd never heard of them. "Every country must have its own

"theme song and we sing the theme song at sporting events

"and war memorials." Weird that those two ended up together.

"Sporting events and war memorials with our hands on our hearts,

"lest they jump out because of how much we love our country."

Do you stand like this for all theme songs? "Yes. Yes, I do."

"Don't you dare skip into, Netflix.

"# So no-one told me life was gonna be this way. #

(LAUGHTER)

Are any of them good songs? "No, they're all shit songs."

I hate during the Olympics when adult friends of mine will say,

"Ooh, the Italian national anthem is quite the banger."

Stick it on in a fucking nightclub and see how you get on.

"No, disc jockey, we don't need Crazy In Love by whoever Beyonce is,

"we need a real banger like the Italian national anthem."

At least some of them don't have words, those are more dignified,

though they're still shit fucking songs.

The words to every national anthem are just,

# My country is the best country

# All other countries

# Stupid fucking countries

# Everything we did in history was good

# Our men are so tall and our women have

# Lovely round boobies. # (LAUGHTER)

And there's people standing there, "Oh, the theme song is sacred.

"They just did the bit about the boobies."

How could this moment get better than someone unfurls a flag?

"Oh, the big towel."

The towel is up and the theme song is playing.

The American theme song is about the towel.

# Oh, the towel is so big

# It's so very big

# It's the biggest towel...

Don't kneel, Colin Kaepernick, this is a serious song.

# You can dry half a shark. #

(LAUGHTER)

Not the worst national anthem, though.

We know the worst national anthem. Our piece-of-shit

national anthem because it's not even about the nation.

# Our old man

# Is the best old man...

I can't remember the tune, it's so fucking boring.

# All other old men, jump in a well

# He's got a hat

# A very lovely hat

# That hat's got a TV show

# It's called The Crown

# If your old man had a TV show. it will pick up

# Shut up, old man, just a bit

# Stop saying his brother is a paedophile

# I've seen you on the internet

# Calling him a sweatless ultra nonce

# I will admit I took a look at the evidence

# Ooh!

# Sometimes I wonder in 20 years' time

# Will there be another Netflix documentary

# Like the Jimmy Savile one and the whole world will say

# Jesus fucking Christ

# Why can't you spot these obvious fucking paedophiles

# At the apex of your establishment?

# But come on, don't say it because his brothers an old man...

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

# Hold on a second

# Wasn't that song about an old lady until quite recently?

# Yes, it was

# But she died and we changed the words to the song

# Weirdly, that's the only time a lot of people in Britain

# Are comfortable with gender pronouns changing...

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

# Where did he get all of those jewels?

# Is it because successive governments went around the world

# Plundering countries of their natural resources

# And subjugating their people for centuries

# Before exiting brutally, sometimes creating

# Geopolitical problems that persist until this day?

# Yes, that's what happened

# But don't mention it because that was ages ago. #

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) Thank you so much for coming out, everybody.

I really, really appreciate it. I hope you had a good night.

Thank you very, very much. Good night!

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk

# I'm doing circles in the firing line

# No comfort in this heart of mine

# It's been a while since that smile graced this face

# And there was panic at the break of dawn. #