It had been so long since I’d been to the Bristol Beacon that they’ve had a full refurbishment, which lasted many years and cost many hundreds of thousands of pounds. A vermin removal service even partially blamed it for our student flat’s mice problem in 2018, claiming the works were disturbing the long-entrenched mice communities along Colston Street. Forced mice migration aside, I was excited to be back, and the main theatre looks swish and atmospheric; the stage is beautifully lit up ready for Nish Kumar and there’s a bubbling excitement in the air. His support, Priya Hall, has the thankless job of not being Nish Kumar for the first portion of the show, which she manages capably – it’s a hard job, but she sells her material well about her eccentric Welsh grandmother and she and her wife’s experience with sperm donation. It’s refreshing to see a show in a venue this size where both acts are people of colour, and the audience were a broad range of ages and ethnicities too (I recently had an argument with someone on online who claimed that only men go to see stand-up comedy, which is why most successful stand-ups are men, because that’s what they enjoy. As sexist arguments go, it’s not even factually accurate.)

Then on bounds Nish Kumar. I’m a keen listener of Pod Save the UK, his current affairs podcast with journalist Coco Khan, but previously I’d only seen him perform twenty minutes of stand-up at a Get Off! Fundraiser in Edinburgh. I remember that as being frenetic and high energy, even in the exhausted, slightly hysterical atmosphere of a midnight, end-of-August compilation Fringe show. But I’d forgotten quite how rapid-fire he is; he starts at a hundred miles an hour, and does not slow down. In a world of Ricky Gervaises and Jimmy Carrs taking pot-shots at vegans and trans people like they’re brave pioneers at the frontiers of modern humour, it’s refreshing to see live comedy taking a chunk out of the right in such an inventive way. Kumar rattles through the recently departed Tory government and their drama; the stupidity of the Gary Lineker Match of the Day furore, Liz Truss (‘breastfed by a car exhaust’), Nigel Farage and the D Day commemorations (‘they’re required to have someone to represent losers’) and musing whether there’ll ever be a good looking right-winger (‘he has scurvy of the face, like they’ve stretched his skin over a shipping container.’) It’s an exhaustingly funny onslaught of rage at the mediocrities of the dying Conservative government. I remember around this point repeatedly slapping my knee with my notebook with laughter – much like Chris Fleming’s show that I saw a few months ago, he achieves the stand-up nirvana of keeping the audience constantly laughing, with each new joke just eliciting a new wave. Then, after half an hour, we have an unexpected break. Kumar explains when he returns that this was mandated by his producer to give us a breather, and presumably to give him some time to ingest a fistful of betablockers.

We continue on in the second half at a slightly more sedate pace, although still a breakneck one. It’s almost impossible to do stand-up about the war in Gaza, but he mixes genuine fury and sadness at the devastation with skewering the ridiculousness of the British press, such as when Palestinian Labour MP Laila Moran was asked by Richard Madeley on Good Morning Britain whether there was ‘any word on the street,’ prior to the October 7th Hamas attack. He also makes an astute and witty point about Russell Brand, something he has discussed more seriously on Pod Save the UK; unlike other artists of various ilks whose excellent work we have to square with their problematic personal views or actions, he points out we are released from this with Brand because his output was also bad.  Amongst this, he finds time to take the mickey out of Bristol, and himself, telling an anecdote about asking people on a train to turn their loud music down so he could go back to listening to himself on a podcast. He also skewers the more populist career choices of his contemporaries, such as James Acaster and Ed Gamble’s food podcast, and teases us with the eventual reveal of having confronted a well-known comedian –  Jimmy Carr – about his feeble justification for appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast (This was the second show I’ve seen this autumn where Jimmy Carr has been dunked on by a peer. There can never be enough.)

There is some room for personal reflection too; his frustration with his inability to change as he ages, the stupidity of breaking his own finger by sitting on it, and attempting to become less self-sabotaging through therapy. On the topic of ageing, I especially liked his section on American tech billionaire Bryan Johnson (who claims to have de-aged his penis fifteen years, as well as generally attempting to de-age in less quantifiable ways – but ultimately looks odder and more vampiric by the day.) Johnson infamously has been receiving blood transfusions from his teenage son to this end, leading to Kumar’s memorable line ‘I will milk him for his delicious life juice.’

His story about completely losing his composure when coming perilously close to meeting Boris Johnson is excellently delivered, becoming more and more hysterical and exploiting every moment of ridiculousness. The final section addresses his mixed feelings about his material; he’s aware that being so righteously furious about politics and politicians is to some degree alienating compared to more run of the mill observational fare (like taking pot shots at vegans.) He attempts the material that would in theory make him more popular; talking about what’s in his fridge. This leads to a prolonged section in which he mixes in the former while reading from his phone a spirited essay on his comedy ethos and the value of political comedy. Although this was very interesting and wholesome, the fact of it being read from his phone, without the varied pacing  and punchlines of his actual material, meant the momentum of the show suffered.

Ultimately however, I left supremely impressed and admiring of Kumar’s skill and wit. He mixes in enough personal material to create a relationship with the audience, while viciously skewering the hypocrisy and stupidity of modern politics. It’s difficult to walk the tightrope of the latter without coming across holier-than-thou, but he manages it effortlessly with his self-deprecating tone and the calibre of his jokes and observations (I think the Nigel Farage shipping container line was my favourite.) As he acknowledges, the heavily leftie-skewing Bristol audience was always going to be on his side, but we enter with levels of anticipation he more than matches.  The intensity of the first half, versus the slightly moderated speed of the second, was an interesting choice, but one he managed to style out. In a commissioning world in which there’s apparently endless budgets for TV travel shows typically starring white male comedian duos, but minimal money for everything else, it would be refreshing and exciting to see him back on TV in another current affairs format – especially under a Labour government. He’s certainly a more entertaining and original use of airtime than Jimmy Carr. Hopefully he’ll be the first to go – after most of the Tory party – when Kumar leads the revolution.

Nish Kumar is on tour until the end of November. Pod Save the UK is available to listen to here. Priya Hall is appearing in various shows around the UK.