For many of us, football is both a source of frustration and absolute euphoria.
— Nish Kumar
As a kid who illegally streamed 'The Daily Show' it has always been a goal of mine.
Apparently, it makes me hard to shop for because I’m constantly buying myself presents.
When I left my family home and had finished university, I stayed in South London but moved closer to London’s center, to Brixton and Herne Hill. Herne Hill is a tiny place that is ridiculously overstocked with lovely pubs.
I think that there’s a real appetite for opinion-driven satire, not just generic making jokes about what’s in the news but actually point-of-view-driven stuff.
When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages.
Having spent half my time at university studying English literature, I know from experience that reading lists often contain more white men than Jacob Rees-Mogg’s last birthday party.
In the event of a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic dystopia, people with supplies of food and water could become warlords or chieftains in the social order that emerges out of the rubble.
Every day I wake up and think: ‘Am I part of the problem? Am I helping further entrench the political divide? All the raging mouthpieces of the right that I’m furious with - am I just the same but on the left?’ I have no easy answers to that.
When we were growing up we were all asked to accept ourselves as British citizens, and I still hold on to this idea that multicultural Britain is possible.
But I like the process of putting a show together and the impact that Edinburgh has on me as a performer.
The job of a comedian is to make people laugh, but a lot of my interests are in politics so I’m going to use that.
You always appreciate it when people stick your neck out to support you.
I’m a touring standup comedian so a lot of the time I’m looking for box sets that I can put on my computer to pass the time on train journeys. I have far too much free time for an adult.
I once got chased off stage by a heavy-metal band.
I like having my mistakes corrected, but I wonder if it’s because you’re forced to have a certain humility if you’re not an affluent white man.
I’ve still got a bit of angst about campaigning for a particular party. I want to write jokes about whoever I want without toeing a party line.
I think I spent a lot of my mid-twenties thinking it was a problem of my onstage persona. But, actually, it was my actual personality. I was still working out what kind of person I was.
The architects of Brexit are a cocktail of lying racists and buffoons. I don’t think even someone as cynical as me could have predicted how deeply stupid these people are.
I’m quite a prolific self-gift-giver.
If you’re reaching for a local reference to drop for a place that is typical of everything wrong with Britain, you would switch between Croydon or Bromley. There is a lot of deprivation there, but it’s not one of the poorest parts of the country.
I’ve given up trying to reason with people who despise me.
And I can tell you from firsthand experience that our train system is a mess. Carriages are full of unhappy travellers packed together like sardines, who have inexplicably paid for the privilege of being incarcerated.
The important thing with Facebook is to remember that it played a role in facilitating Brexit because it inadvertently allowed leave-supporting groups to use harvested data to target key voters.
When refugees are at a distance it’s easy to be compassionate.
I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus but you also have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows.
One of the things I’ve stopped doing is going out of my way to make people feel OK about their mistakes.
I’m interested in offence and why people take offence in certain ways about certain things.
But there comes a landing point, where you finally get to a stage where you have something to hang your hat on. Then your family see that this is definitely happening and you’re making a success of it.
I consider it, the life of being a comedian - they have a right to boo me.
Viola Davis is just one of those actors who is never bad in anything. She could be in an awful film but you’d never come away from it saying she was bad.
Everywhere's a party with me - I'm a factory of good times.
I’m in the middle of an existential crisis in how I approach comedy about these big issues. I sometimes find, when I get drawn on the subject of race, it’s too close to home for me and I can’t articulate what I’m trying to get across.
I wish sometimes I had a passion for hats and cheese and I could do a fun show about putting hats on cheese.
If you can build up a sense of self-confidence if you’re non-white by the time you’re 15, 16 then that can’t be taken away from you.
I just love buying myself presents. Is that a crime?
I got fired from a job years ago. It was an accounting job. They were basically trying to cut corners, so they employed a bunch of temps to do proper accounting. And it just caused absolute bedlam and I did get fired.
I grew up in the South London outer areas of Bromley and Croydon. Bromley and Croydon are interchangeable punch lines to any joke somebody wants to make about a shit part of England.
Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face.
I’m a standup comedian who can’t drive. I have never learned. I don’t trust my hand-eye coordination. You’re looking at someone who once dropped a cricket ball on to his own head during a routine catching practice; I don’t think it’s a great idea to have me in control of a high-speed metal death robot.
Brexit is a ceaseless grind of conversations about customs unions and backstops. Anything that can add an air of whimsical, childlike wonder to proceedings can only be a good thing.
We’ve all been there - you find something moving, you commission a painting. I know one wall of my living room is taken up by a mural of the end of Toy Story 3.
We were in denial about the extent to which Britain had cured itself of the poison of racism.
August is the time when I can feel myself getting stronger as a comedian. I’m at the height of my powers come September.
You have to have your own internal barometer of what is too far. I try and consider feelings of people in the audience. What you have to try and do is that when there is something that could be seen as a transgression, you actually have a reason to justify the joke.
I got out of university and there was a general panic throughout my family as to what I was going to do. For about six months, I did this job in recruitment and I was just so awful at it. I jumped before I was pushed.
I spend a lot of time bathing in a glow of consensus, but you have to be willing to say something to people who might not agree with you and take the consequences of what follows.
I'm quite good at Lego and Fifa, but they don't translate in the real world.
All comedy shows make me feel better about everything.
I don’t feel I’m in competition with anyone. My sense is of it being like school: I don’t want to beat anyone but I don’t want to get left behind. That’s a great motivator. I like impressing my friends.
