I Just Read About That…

[DID NOT ATTEND: March 2, 2025] Nish Kumar

I know Nish Kumar from Taskmaster, where he was hilarious.  I have since grown to love him from his appearances on various podcasts, including his own Pod Save the UK.

When he announced that he was touring the US and playing Philly, I grabbed my wife and I tickets immediately.

And holy crap was he funny.  He ranted for 90 minutes and we never stopped laughing the whole time.

Most of his material is political (and there’s so much to choose from in 2025), but there were also personal observations (his poor therapist gets mentioned A LOT), and even a joke or two about his fridge and his mom.

In his current tour, he is upfront with how his therapist warned him against discussing traumatic unprocessed memories on stage, saying that re-telling unprocessed memories can re-traumatise you.

What’s his comedy like?  It’s fast, angry and very funny.  Think Lewis Black but less deranged sounding.  He’s also got a wonderful outsiders perspective on the US that can make you see thinks a little differently, although as he points out, his radical left wing base probably sees things this way already.  But, as a Brown person, he brings a whole new perspective on, well everything.

Like how Indians should be pleased that they are getting represented in politics, even though these people are the worst representatives of their culture who routinely abuse and put down their own people.

I loved his idea that billionaires should not be allowed to breed.   And we all collectively agreed that we wished the guy who “shot” tr*mp had better aim.

He had a lengthy bit about Bryan Johnson, the guy who founded Venmo and is now doing all kinds of questionable things to prevent himself from dying.  This is why billionaires should not breed.  I didn’t know anything about the guy and now I wish I hadn’t.  But the bits were hilarious.  We all agreed that the guy who is getting daily plasma infusions to try to cheat death should absolutely get hit by a car (and reversed back over).  And no we wouldn’t feel bad about that at all.

Nish is so funny.  His metaphors and similes are great and well conceived and he just goes on and on seemingly without stopping for breath.

It’s impossible to sum up a show, but here’s what Nish says from an interview with Varsity

He admits that “if I ever left one [of my setlists] on the bus, I’d look like sort of a psychopath”. Whilst he does like the “technical challenge” of trying to get people to laugh “at 90 minutes of comedy about the worst subjects imaginable”, he stresses that the political stuff is “what is obsessing [him]”, and the stuff in his show always reflects “the constant churn of things that [he’s] thinking about”.

He rails against people asking the wrong questions, like Is it okay to like art by a bad person.  When we should be asking things like Why is a billionaire allowed to have control over a government.  He has a very funny segment about an unnamed comedian who hosted a show about art by bad people and the example they used was famous watercolorist Adolf Hitler.  Aside from that being stupid, his real point was that by making even offhanded comments that trivialize brutality, it makes it easier for politicians to do it as well.  Hence his beef with Ricky Gervais as well.

It doesn’t seem like this show should be funny, but holy crap it is.  And it was very nice to be reminded that there were people (like this room full of people) who all agreed with each other about how terrible things are.  And how his mom told him that she had been through the rise of the actual Hitler already and he was beaten back.  So, there was hope.

Just don’t let him get away with his fridge jokes (actually the mustard one was pretty funny).