I’m basically a theatre critic who occasionally inflicts himself on comedy shows, and I have to say what really impressed me about Nish Kumar’s new show was his diction.
Probably the country’s most mainstream overtly leftwing comic, Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe is a bit like being run over by a freight train. He doesn’t ease us into a concept or anything, he just mentions that he’s toured this show to the US and that friends asked him what it was like out there and then he ‘discusses’ the current state of America in a tone that strongly suggests he’s having a rage induced panic attack. The funniest thing about the title is that it’s never explained because it doesn’t need to be explained. The show is very loud, very fast, and there was nary a moment in which I didn’t feel concerned about his wellbeing. And yet the man truly does have terrific diction: shouting at full volume and breakneck pace, not a syllable is lost.
Even though one of the many anxieties Kumar expresses throughout is that he doesn’t really have ‘an act’ and this is just what he’s like all the time, this is clearly not entirely true. You can view him as a sort of anti-Stewart Lee, eschewing all structural trickery in favour of blurting out his panicked inner monologue at deafening volume. But of course his rants are tightly structured, and frankly the sheer stamina needed to deliver them is impressive. Plus you can’t be the anti-Stewart Lee when you both have routines about how awful you think Ricky Gervais is.
Nonetheless, the despair is real. We signed up to have our vibes killed and over the course of an hour-and-a-quarter Kumar despairs magnificently at everything from what Rishi Sunak’s brief stint running the country meant to him as a fellow British Indian (he didn’t like it), to the state of his own mental health (not great, though seemingly somewhat on the up since a nadir last summer when he attempted to do material about the Southport riots in realtime).
It’s the increasingly personal nature of the material that marks his latest show out from much of what’s gone before, but what’s impressive-slash-horrifying is how adeptly Kumar makes his personal struggles of a piece with his general horror at the world – which is not surprising as his horror at the world is the source of his personal struggles.
But the vulnerability is important: if he was just sitting in his ivory tower shouting about things he didn’t like for 75 minutes then he'd be the sneery liberal as his detractors paint him to be. Instead the sense that doing this stuff really costs him gives his act integrity, even if you wonder how long he can actually keep doing this. Plus, he has great diction.