Top 61 Quotes & Sayings by Nish Kumar
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British comedian Nish Kumar.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
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'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.
There's a fear when you're a comedian of just being hectoring, so you do try to fight against that.
I consider it, the life of being a comedian - they have a right to boo me.
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'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.
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'm sure when alternative comedy started, before which - Billy Connolly aside - standup was essentially a person being racist and sexist onstage, there was also the sense that this was the death of comedy. But it's just progress.
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.
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.
But I like the process of putting a show together and the impact that Edinburgh has on me as a performer.
My parents wanted me to be a lawyer.
We were in denial about the extent to which Britain had cured itself of the poison of racism.
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.
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.
Doing political comedy you do feel guilty that you aren't trying to change problems, you are merely exploiting them for your own financial gain.
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.
When refugees are at a distance it's easy to be compassionate.
I just love buying myself presents. Is that a crime?
I might have been lucky to grow up in the 90s, but I think, actually, we started getting complacent about prejudice. We thought we had killed prejudice, and if you were still talking about it you were just going on too much.
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.
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 wasn't as cynical about Britain as a lot of friends of mine who are also people of colour.
All comedy shows make me feel better about everything.
There's a 'Seinfeld' episode, where he talks about why he can't get angry, because his voice rises to a comedic pitch and no one takes him seriously - and that's true of me, too.
I'm quite good at Lego and Fifa, but they don't translate in the real world.
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.
When I am on stage, I am often thinking about what I will eat after the show.
I have a strange nose: it's big and weird.
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 wish sometimes I had a passion for hats and cheese and I could do a fun show about putting hats on cheese.
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.
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.
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.
Apparently, it makes me hard to shop for because I'm constantly buying myself presents.
I'm interested in offence and why people take offence in certain ways about certain things.
August is the time when I can feel myself getting stronger as a comedian. I'm at the height of my powers come September.
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.
One of the things I've stopped doing is going out of my way to make people feel OK about their mistakes.
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.
As a kid who illegally streamed 'The Daily Show' it has always been a goal of mine.
I'm quite a prolific self-gift-giver.
For many of us, football is both a source of frustration and absolute euphoria.
During the Brexit campaign there was a deficit of outrage.
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.
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.
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.
Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face.
I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.
I've given up trying to reason with people who despise me.
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.
You always appreciate it when people stick your neck out to support you.
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.
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.
Everywhere's a party with me - I'm a factory of good times.
When you're walking down the street and a kid shouts 'paki' it does start to get to you.
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 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.
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.
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