Political comedian Nish Kumar is fairly sure he can get laughs even in our current dark times.
He won't be able to avoid topical material when he starts his nationwide tour Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe in Oxford, he says.
"That’s the challenge of it, to try and find the funny in it," he says. "Yes I’ll talk about Gaza, I do what’s on the news. No subject matter is off limits.
"If you talk about the news you can’t not have an opinion if it becomes too inconvenient - we just have to try to find a way to communicate it.
"The challenge is how you want to talk about that subject and what you want to say about it. That’s the joy of comedy really – no subject matter is off limits."
As well as climate collapse and income inequality "to kill the mood even further" he will also tackle "the emotional sensation of being a British Indian man who isn’t going to vote for a British Indian Prime Minister".
"Conservative Party HQ yesterday posted on their social media platforms something like 'things that people think are great about Britain'. I see they’ve taken it down because people made so much fun of it," he says.
"I’m not the one British Indian man who isn’t going to vote for a British Indian Prime Minister – quite a lot of us aren't going to vote for him.
"We’re at the end of a cycle. I think there’s a real fatigue there and after 14 years it’s very, very difficult to blame anyone else.
"The way they’ve handled things at some points, it’s maddening and sometimes it’s hilarious.
"I think for the good of everybody Rishi Sunak needs to go whatever happens."
But the host of The Mash Report, which journalist Andrew Neil called “self-satisfied, self-adulatory, unchallenged left-wing propaganda”, admits: "I'm a lifelong Labour voter but I think a lot of things the Labour party has done on Gaza are giving its core voters sleepless nights at the moment – myself included."
Kumar currently hosts the popular Pod Save The UK podcast "so I am kind of professionally obligated to be across the news", he says.
"I find it incredibly frustrating and I am incredibly fortunate that I have an outlet for that frustration both the podcast and stand up.
"Having had stand up for the last decade has been a real privilege for me."
The Mash Report was originally pitched as a modern-day, British version of US comedy institution The Daily Show and he has always admired political satire.
He says: "I grew up loving Ross Noble and Chris Morris and Chris Rock back in the day. I watched a lot of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
"I saw Maria Bamford in 2016 and came away feeling I’d watched somebody do my job as well as it was possible to do it.
"I’m a comedy fan. That’s why I became a comedian, and I’ve not stopped being a comedy fan."
The double Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee started out alongside a group of comedians like Tom Allen, Suzi Ruffell, Josh Widdicombe, James Acaster, Joel Dommett and Rose Matafeo who are now frequent faces across television and on radio.
"We’re all still really good mates," he says.
"I don’t really think there’s any point in being competitive when you’re doing comedy – we’re not 100 metre runners, there’s no objective measure of success or failure. And we all felt the same there wasn’t any point in us being competitive.
"And also we all came through at a time when there were jobs in television.
"I don’t think we’re inherently more virtuous than anyone else. It’s just that we’ll all came through at a time when there was a lot more opportunity.
"Now I think that opportunity has receded unfortunately because of lack of money in television and lack of money in television going into comedy."
A frequent visitor to Oxford, he has done gigs at the Glee Club and did stand up in the city often in the early days.
"Oxford audiences have always been very good to me," he says, adding that he tried and failed to get into Oxford University.
"And to be fair they were correct. Do I regret it, god no, I’d have been kicked out week one.
"I was at Durham University and Cambridge and Oxford has an exchange programme where we could all go and do shows at each other’s universities.
"It was the absolute lowest rung of comedy, the least cool people. So we would basically socialise with each other and then we would go and see each other's shows."
Returning to the Oxford Playhouse, where he first took the stage in 2016 will bring back memories.
"It was the first time I’d done a theatre of that size and I’d never seen that many people in a room from the perspective of being on stage before. So I’m really happy I’m doing the Playhouse again," he says.
"It’ll be a nice full circle for me - some 18 years later it’s good to be back."
The show promises "80 minutes of sweet, sweet vibe killing, plus support act and interval".
"There will be an opening act – I like to bring a friend along," says the 39-year-old, adding he's looking forward "to dragging my increasingly decrepit body out on tour".
"The shows get quite long so we’ll have to structure it around intervals to give people a breather, and give myself, a breather.
"I do 90 minutes on stage and I realise I’m actually losing the ability to do five minutes and I actually need to work out how I do that again.
"What’s great about it is you get to go home. It’s not like a band tour where you just pack up on a bus for three weeks.
"It’s quite spread out so I’m always home in London on Mondays and Tuesdays and that I think is a huge part of it being sustainable."
Meanwhile as well as the podcast he has the second series of Hold The Front Page coming out on Sky Max and Now TV at the end of the month with Last Leg host Josh Widdicombe.
"It's a show where we go and work at local newspapers. We’ve worked all over the place – in the first series we went to Blackpool, Belfast the series ended with us on The Observer a national newspaper – the idea was that we would hone our skills and then go there.
"And this year we’ve been to the Isle of Wight, we’ve been to Devon, which was a homecoming for Josh. We’ve been to an English language newspaper in Benidorm which, let me tell you, was an eye opening experience.
"It’s just Benidorm man it’s nuts, absolutely nuts. It’s such a mad place, we had great fun doing the show.
“We met a lot of great people and great newspaper editors while making this show,” he said “but we also felt a lot of that sinking feeling when you realise nothing has been set up for you and you have to go out there and find something to write up.”
Would they come to the Oxford Mail? "Yeah it would definitely be one of the places we’d like to go for sure."
The Nish Don't Kill My Vibe tour kicks off in September 2024. Tickets are on sale now and available from www.nishkumar.co.uk.
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