Abstract
Posters of various taboo-confronting shows at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland
Credit: Ronnie McMillan / Alamy Stock Photo
British comedians
Islam, expressing right-wing views that you agree with and support, immigration, supporting Israel, Cilla Black, Cecil the Lion and animal hunting.
My latest show is about Isis and jihadi brides, but the first bit is about offence. I do a joke in there somewhere relating to Cilia Black [British singer and TV presenter who recently died]. A friend of mine was in the audience one night and she heard a woman say, “I really enjoyed that, but that joke about Cilia was going too far”. I do jokes about Isis, terrorism, religion, offence, and the only thing that offended her was a reference to Cilla? I need to try harder.
When I really want to shock people, I do a joke about anal sex. I only use it in extreme circumstances, like when an audience is falling asleep, or I’ve totally lost them and need to get them back. It works every time; people laugh out of shock. Oddly, people are often offended when I talk about being offended. They get offended that I am not taking offence seriously; they think I shouldn’t be joking about it.
I feel that I can say what I want on stage in this country, until someone tries to physically stop me, which has happened, when a man walked up to the stage once and said: “I want you to stop speaking”, but I didn’t stop. I’ve also performed overseas – in India, Oman, Pakistan and Kosovo – and had people tell me not to talk about specific subjects like, sex, religion and drugs. But, in this country, especially at Edinburgh Festival, you can say and do anything.
I wanted to call my current show The Road to Al Baghdad, since the leader of Isis is Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. But The Tricycle theatre wouldn’t let me, so I changed it to The Kardashians Made Me Do It. All I can say is that Kardashian fans are having the shock of their life when they come to the show. But the audience soon understands the relevance of the title and it all makes sense when they come.
It is a shame that I was made to change the title; it shows the fear that people have where Isis is concerned. Fear is the most powerful tool and renders even the strongest wills impotent. But all you have to do is say something, make a joke about it. Giving in to Isis even on this very small scale is taking us backwards against all the things that Britain is great for: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, satire, humour.
I am just a comedian, and that is I all I want to be. I want to be able to make jokes about whatever I want. I don’t want to be Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi. But if I do a show about Isis, suddenly I’m considered to be speaking about my entire race. This is ridiculous. I just want to tell jokes. Why do people have to turn me into something so much bigger? All I can say is that we must be desperate for role models of a certain kind at this time, and any role model will do!
**In a statement The Tricycle told Index it had given advice to Mirza about the show when it was untitled. It was happy to offer its opinion.
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When I started out, in 1986, all alternative comedy in the UK was political. The taboos that were being smashed by the first comedians at the Comedy Store in 1979 were a reaction against the prevailing comedy of the time, which was often (not always) racist, sexist and, perhaps most importantly, apolitical. Our next step involved overturning the previous taboo-break – by doing material that wasn’t especially political and/or politically correct. Our style was more self-revealing and confessional, and about sex and football and pop music and personal observation.
There’s been a kind of backwards and forwards oscillation for and against political correctness in comedy ever since. But the big issue with trying to push boundaries in comedy now is social media. Everyone has a voice now, so anyone can object to a joke. What you often see on Twitter is manufactured outrage: people have this outlet to let others know who they are, and nothing turns up the volume on who you are like outrage. Comedy is a focal point for all that, being highly monitored by the dying-to-be-outraged.
I think there is a small, tiny probably, faction of students who are very politicised, especially around gender issues, and some of that is good, and some of that is that same kind of reflex outrage for the sake of identity-creation. Those are the ones who might be hard perhaps to do comedy for. I think if you are banning feminist Germaine Greer from speaking on campus, you’re unlikely to accept controversial comedians like Doug Stanhope or Frankie Boyle.
I’m currently developing a show about my family. It’s about memory and honesty, about how you remember people close to you, with my belief being that you can only bring people back to life in the mind and in reportage by remembering them in a 360-degree, warts-and-all way. This can be complicated when it’s your mum and dad, but everyone who has seen it seems to think it works as a comic tribute to them. It’s an edgy show because it reveals a lot, and that revelation is being done without those people’s informed consent – my mother is dead, and my dad has dementia – but the show takes on that quandary. And the alternative would be silence, and I’m not sure that’s good, especially on dementia, which is such a large issue now. It’s true that people with dementia can’t often talk about their condition, but I think it’s ok for their children to do so, as they’re the ones dealing with it.
I remember doing a joke at the Montreal Comedy Festival in the late 1990s about how the KFC fast-food chain (Kentucky Fried Chicken) was called PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky) in Quebec, despite KFC being known as KFC everywhere else in the world, even in France. So PFK, I said, must stand for Petty French Canadians. Admittedly, it is not a joke that works very well written down, but it got a round of applause from some people at the gala in Montreal and boo-ing from others. Which if you are trying to break taboos – even ones to do with fried chicken – is exactly the response you want.
