Comedy

How did you get started in stand-up?
‘I’ve always wanted to do it since I was a little girl. I did Margaret Thatcher impressions when I was a kid and got that taste for being funny. However, I went to a really rough-and-tumble secondary school. Whenever I tried to be the class clown, I got shot down and I wasn’t allowed to be visible because I was just a porky Asian girl. I went to university, to study community theatre and issue-based drama. Comedy was always my dirty little secret passion, but I was never confident enough to go for it. Then one day I came across an advert for a comedy course in the City Lit brochure. I did it and that was that.’ Feature continues

When you were starting out, what was your original five-minute set about?
‘I think it was probably about boys because that was pretty much all I thought about. I resurrected a joke recently that was part of my original five. I think that’s quite interesting to do as a comic. You can go back eight years later and grab something you did when you first started. It’s lying there gathering dust in the filing cabinet of your mind, and you think, “That would really work now,” and of course you do it after ten years of experience and you make it kick ass.’

You come from a family of performers, don’t you?
‘My dad is very well known among Iranians as a storyteller and writer. He does one-man shows and is fabulously talented. He is one of those people who, by the age of 19, was already well-known in Iran. He’s all about pathos. He can make you laugh and cry at the drop of a hat.’

Didn’t your family have to leave Iran because your father’s writing got him in trouble?
‘The satire he wrote was attacking the Islamic Republic’s ideologies. He had mobs in the streets shouting “Death to Khorsandi!” So we fled to England, where he carried on writing and started his own satirical newspaper. In 1984, Scotland Yard uncovered a plot to assassinate him in London. When this happened it rocked the foundations of our family and we had to go into hiding. I was only 11 years old. It’s only now I realise how much it affected me.

'The fear of losing my parents was so intense. Growing up, the threat of terrorism was a very real experience for us, and not just to our family, but to other Iranian dissidents. It was so real that you lived in constant fear of it. We had friends who lost a son because their video shop was burnt down. The ex-prime minister of Iran was assassinated and my father knew him, visited him, it was all very close. I remember one time I came home from school and there was a burnt-out Volkswagen Beetle in the street and I thought instantly “That’s my dad, that’s a car bomb,” and my heart just melted down to the floor. It wasn’t, but that’s what it was like. My dad would go out in his car and I’d watch from the window to see if it would blow up. When me and my brother got in to the car we’d hold hands and squeeze our eyes shut.

‘It was just so real for us, but we weren’t allowed to talk about it. My mum would say, “Don’t tell your friends because they will think you are odd.”

‘Back in the ’80s, the threat felt like it was just to us. However, we could differentiate between fanatics and ordinary Muslims. I don’t think people do now, not since 9/11. Although we’ve been living alongside Muslims for decades and decades, now we’re acting as if they’ve suddenly been beamed down from Fundamentalist Land. The difference is back then I saw the perpetrators as individuals and not a faith, not a people. Now people see the terrorists as a faith and a people.’

You’ve recently had a baby. Has that changed your material or your outlook?
‘When I had the baby, I wasn’t prepared for just how much I’d love him. I used to do jokes about how Iranian mums’ terms of endearment are always things like “I’m going to sacrifice my life for you”. But that’s all I want him to know every day. I want him to know that I would get a fork and gouge my eye out, just scrape it out of my eye socket for him. I would do that in a heartbeat.

‘Don’t worry, though, I’m not going to start rambling on for an hour about me and my child on stage. But I do spend more time looking at London and the world he’s growing up in. There’s so much aggression and violence, and that’s really scary. At the moment, we’ve got the impression that we live in Sin City and that everyone’s carrying a knife.

‘There are always horrors on the news. The Government is constantly saying things like, “Why is there so much knife crime? Why don’t kids have respect for life?” Could it possibly be because our Government kicked the shit out of Afghanistan and Iraq for no fucking reason? Could it possibly be that they’re the ones not setting a good example? It’s not a new thing, though – I remember when I went to school 20-odd years ago: on my first day in secondary school, someone got stabbed in our playground. It’s always gone on, but it is appropriate to look at it now and it makes me feel better talking about it. If I can chat about it in my act and make people laugh,for some reason it all seems a little less scary and I can get on the night bus a little bit easier. Besides, fear is always good comedy fodder.’

Shappi Khorsandi is appearing at the Soho Theatre August 8 & 9.