Nish Kumar: ‘Do they just hate my jokes?’

Nish Kumar considers himself a mild-mannered British Asian man who does comedy. So why does he attract so much rage from the rightwing press and social media?

Hide your commemorative Brexit coins! Here comes Nish Kumar, scourge of the sensible right, pirate-chief of the woke left, swinging in fresh from a morning spent toppling statues, hexing Conservative politicians, rolling up Union Jack flags and smoking them like giant cartoon cigars… Kidding. The real Nish Kumar is boyish and bearded, a 35-year-old comedian who likes to loaf around in an Adidas tracksuit and slip-on Simpsons trainers, who leans left in his politics and who (in keeping with a million British comics before him) enjoys making jokes at the expense of the government of the day. When Kumar looks in the mirror, he tells me, he sees a well-to-do, fundamentally harmless British Asian man. He barely recognises the dangerous lefty ghoul who gets criticised in the right-wing press and lambasted on social media as a bigot, a hater, someone who is “anti-British”, who “pour[s] scorn on Britain’s achievements”.

“It’s baffling,” Kumar shrugs, when we meet one afternoon in south London. He hasn’t brought along a sack of bulldogs for us to be mean to, or suggested we boo some royals. Instead, we sit on a wall in the sun, in a neighbourhood not far from where he grew up, drinking takeaway coffees while Kumar makes mild jokes about gentrification. “This is one of the last un-gentrified bits of south London, this wall we’re sitting on,” he says. “In about six months, this wall? It’ll be an artisanal Fabergé egg dispensary. Gen-Z will be flocking here.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3orTBOX