Revisited – S1 E2: Nish Kumar, comedian

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life Because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most Is often that snack you cobbled together when you curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:46Hello friends. Now, whilst I eat flapjack in a regional garden centre cafe and buy another doomed Asperdestra during the comfort eating August maxi break, I thought we could serve you up a sprinkling of my favourite episodes. These are the ones that made me laugh, cry, eat till I was uncomfortably stuffed and in some cases see the celeb in question in a very different light. Mish Kumar is one of Britain's best-known comic faces. He is politically aware, razor-sharp in wit and prolific. in his gigging. I made the mistake of thinking I was meeting a serious adult human person. Oh, how wrong I was.

1:34This was probably one of the very first episodes I recorded of Comfort Eating. It made me realise for sure we were onto something with this ostensibly silly but very revealing show. I will be back in September, I promise you, with more perfectly sized portions of comfort eating nourishment. In the meantime, here is Nish Kumar.

2:07Hello friends, I'm just finishing up breakfast. I'm getting ready to go out and sit and share some food in a kitchen with Nish Kumar. The breakfast today is two boiled eggs mashed into a bowl with a bit of salad cream with some toast. It's basically the breakfast of a toddler.

2:34Nish. Now, Nish has been on the comedy circuit since the mid-naughties. I think he's steadily become one of the most recognisable faces in UK comedy. he's a very strong panel show guest on things like Muck the Week. He also did Live at the Apollo and he's known for hosting the MASH Report. Always comes across to me as a very slick and focused person who has his life completely together. Anyway, we are going to have a lovely afternoon chatting together. OK, one more bite and I'm out the door. Bye.

3:21hello nish kuma and welcome to comfort eating thank you so much for joining me my pleasure grace thank you for having me someone told me that despite the fact that you are you know you're quite big time now right you're pretty recognizable man must be making a lot of money but you still wear clothes until they fall to pieces that's correct that's correct that's absolutely i thought What is the oldest piece of clothing that you're wearing today? Probably my jeans. I only wear those jeans now. But since all the big comedy money has been coming in, have you went out and bought something, you know, ostentatious?

4:02Do you have a suit that you put on? Last time I was touring, I thought I might be nice to buy a nice suit. But to be totally honest with you, I'm like Elvis, like late period Elvis. on stage, the amount of sweat that I go through. Like eventually I will just have to have one of those like white suits made for me. Rhymestones split to the navel. Yeah. I actually thought I was going to get some pushback on that question. Okay. No, Grace, let's describe for the listener what I'm wearing. For the listener. I'm wearing a T-shirt that I bought at the NBC gift store in 30 Rock. Okay. That's an outline of Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation.

4:44It's kind of yellow. I mean, it was yellow at one point. It's definitely supposed to be yellow. I'm wearing Simpsons Vans. I'm basically dressed like what a 12-year-old boy imagines they will dress like when they have the power of what they can wear every day. Each week, I get to taste my guest's favourite comfort food dish. Now, this is the thing that you love to eat alone, but it isn't necessarily something that you would be proud to share. What have you brought for me today? Do you want me to get it out now? Well, Grace, I've bought you. Listen, you asked for it. I asked for it. I asked for it.

5:22Go on. I have bought chips with chicken shawarma meat and hummus that I lump together in a big horrible soup. And that is the thing that I eat when nobody is looking. I am absolutely not disgusted with you. I'm proud of you. Oh, that's good. I'm proud of you on so many levels. Right. So it's chips. shawarma meat yeah and hummus now hummus to me is the random factor here because i'm not saying i don't like hummus but with that i would want like a garlicky sauce or some kind of chili sauce or something like that hummus feels like it's from a completely different like but go on listen i cannot tell you i eat hummus absolutely amazing straight i eat hummus straight out of the tub like it's a weird chickpea soup.

6:14But it's something that I absolutely love. And for the benefit of the listener, this is your common and garden plastic tray. No, no, what is it? Polystyrene tray full of... Now, it is chicken. I just don't know what part. It's never good to think about what part. About 10 years ago when I was living in a house share with a couple of my friends, we used to refer to it as chicken ass. Yeah. Because there's no way there's not some ass in there. There's absolutely no way. Is this a fairly good representation of how you like it? This is just, to me, this is just a load of chips with the meat mixed in.

6:59It's that kind of grey, brown meat. Yeah. And it's just stirred through it. I've said before that with restaurants you know obviously I'm a restaurant critic I love going to posh places but to me a polystyrene carton of chips like this is happiness and to me I would have it with curry sauce like chips curry sauce with me with the way it's served now it's a little bit bland I'd like vinegar on it vinegar salt hot sauce well as a connoisseur of chicken ass meat hummus and chips. Let me tell you. This is very solid stuff. This is really this is made by someone who knows what they're doing. And what they're trying to do is kill me from a heart attack in five years.

7:48This is someone who has made a plan and is executing the plan. What a way to go though. Do you know something? He died as he lived full of chips. Was he wearing the rhinestone suit? with his belly button just slightly, slightly showing.

8:13You've described the school age niche as, and I quote, a smartass piece of shit.

8:24Is that true? Yeah, that's a double quote. You're quoting me and I'm quoting from my school reports. Yeah. Do you think that being a smart ass piece of shit, does that help you in your world today? Well, I think the thing with me was that I was just, I was just always in trouble at school, but only because whenever somebody tells me to do something, my first instinct is always, why? I'm not going to do it. And then you have to take a second and you go, the doctor is just advising you to take this medicine. Like this. I don't know where that comes from. But when I was at school and my teacher would be like, can you do this work?

9:02I'd be like, no. That's why I think I try and use phrases like rebellious spirit, but I continually return to the phrase smart ass piece of shit. This is it. I often think rebellious. And then I think, am I just a dickhead? Just a dickhead, aren't I? Watch Rebel Without a Cause back now as an adult. You're like, this man's a dickhead. He's just a dickhead. You grew up in Croydon. Correct. With your mum and your dad. Correct. And your younger brother, who sounds like a lively person, your younger brother. The interesting thing is he's become a very nice adult. When he was a little kid, I was very happy to be left alone and I would read books and you could just sort of leave me in a corner.

9:48And he was just this like Tasmanian devil of just chaos. And obviously now when people meet him, they can't square that because now he's like, he's also incredibly tall. And we look alike. So I sort of look like he's looking into a funhouse mirror, like, which is like squashed him and distended him. And he's like this like tall, very respectable looking gentleman. Sounds actually quite fit as well, actually, the way that you're describing. People often refer to him as your handsome brother. Friends of mine refer to him as your handsome brother, which is cold. My mum calls him the normal one.

10:31Oh, dear. But like when you were growing up, so there's your mum and your dad and your brother and you in the house. Were you a close family? Did you get on really well? Yeah. I mean, we all got on well. We were a close family. I would say we're still a close family. I speak to my mother every day because if I don't, the police will show up at my house. If I don't make some form of contact with my mother once every 24 hours, there will be a SWAT team. Do you run everything past her? Not career stuff. I don't really run past her because I think they find my career quite stressful. and so I try and only run things past them at the point where at the point where they're going to read about it in the papers.

11:22Yeah. I think if I told them every single thing that was going on, that would be too much information. Yeah. And they would find it quite stressful. Do you know what's really strange? As you started to talk about your parents, you've become more childlike and I can see that you, they really worry about you Because you are actually, there's something strange about sitting talking to you because you are very slick on television and very adult and like often like the straight man on the MASH report. You kind of keep that face and you're like the safe pair of hands. Yeah. But I've been with you for 10 minutes.

11:59You're not like that. Carnage. Absolute chaos. I absolutely wouldn't trust you to like water plants. That's correct. That's correct. I feel very seen. Or like, you know, if I gave you a letter to post on the way home, I don't think it's going to go there. No, of course it's not. It would be in the bottom of your bag. I'm genuinely amazed that you managed to pick all of this stuff up because my parents will be thrilled listening to this because this is the kind of thing where they're like, yeah, we've been saying this for years. So you have a very small family in Croydon. Yeah. But then when you go to Leicester.

12:35Correct. There's a big family. And your granddad had restaurants? Yeah, my grandfather was an accountant for a long time. And then he just decided he'd had enough. And he ran, from the time that I was born, I think he ran Indian restaurants in Leicester. He had one, I can never remember which order it is. One was called a Raj and the other one was called a Taj. So he did those two. And then he sort of lived, I guess, the dream of the integrated immigrant. Because he had two Indian restaurants. And then when he retired, he was running a greasy spoon. He would get these enormous Christmas decorations for the calf.

13:12And he would then bring, we would spend holidays in Leicester, especially Christmas, with me and my aunt and uncle and cousins. And my uncle would all sort of descend on, you know, my grandparents lived in a sort of two and a half bedroom terrace in Leicester. and somehow we would sleep, what was it, 8, 10, 11 of us. We'd sleep 11 of us in a two-bedroom with a single-bedroom study thing. We'd all manage to sleep in there. It's like The Godfather when they say go to the mattresses. That's what it was like because there would truly be mattresses everywhere in all the corridors and the communal spaces.

13:53There'd just be mattresses up because, like, my grandparents used to sleep in their bed and me and my cousin used to sleep on single mattresses that we'd slot either side of their bed. And there wasn't any other floor space. So if I could take you back right now to Leicester, to that house, and there's like 12, 11 people, all on mattresses, they've gone to the mattresses, what's cooking? Well, my grandmother is an incredible cook. And even now, if I'm going home, she's like, I've fried some fish for you. there's like a sort of Indian style of fried fish where she'll like fry sardines or she'll make me a very traditional carer of fish curry and it's I mean it's so good my mum keeps saying like I just don't know how she's still doing it you need to write it down just go and ask her I know but it's that's the most interesting thing about it when you talk to her about it she never knows the exact she would never be she would never say to you you need one cup of this half whatever it is if you ask her how much you put in of everything she says enough and so everything is done by like instinct and this sort of learned knowledge it's it's her food is genuinely incredible and when she used to cook more i mean she used to cook like a whole christmas dinner and then pork curry for my dad and my uncle because and this is a direct quote if we eat that turkey it will block us up for a month so we used to have truly a full traditional christmas dinner and then there would be like pork curry and then when we would go in the summer my grandfather bought this like huge barbecue and my grandmother used to marinate tandoori chicken and i think to be honest if i had to like pick one like comfort food from my childhood or definitely like the food that i really associate with that house, it's tandoori chicken on the barbecue.

15:51And my grandmother would like marinate it for 24 hours in advance and then bring out this enormous bowl with just these sort of like lightly pink chickens that had been marinated in the tandoori spices and then loads of yogurt. And then it would just go on the barbecue. Yeah. Nice smell. Oh, yeah. It's like it's I can smell it almost immediately. It's the most evocative food of that time.

16:25So Indian food played a big part in your childhood. Well, I'm imagining that there must have been a lot of fast food options in Croydon. Did you and your brother have a favourite? Well, for me and my brother, there were two levels of treat you could get us. The mid-level was chicken nuggets from McDonald's with barbecue sauce. But the real big treat was Pizza Hut. For us, someone who is a similar age to me said, you know, we really lived through the golden age of Pizza Hut. I'm 35 and I really think the stuffed crust at Pizza Hut, I still believe that to be one of the great technological innovations of our time.

17:10I really don't know how they got the cheese in there. I don't know what the process was. I feel like the word game changer was invented because people had to adequately describe what the stuffed crust meant and then there was a point where they started wrapping the cheese in pepperoni I think at some stage but yeah you know by then they'd gone mad with power but the period that I'm talking about is when you had you're talking about here's the things stuffed crust pizza that buffet which was like four quid for all you can eat or something the key thing was just eat as much as you can as quickly as you can and then feel very ill And then when they brought in the ice cream factory, I mean, for somebody with a genetic predisposition towards type two diabetes, I was really playing fast and loose with my own genetic inheritance when that thing came along.

17:56If me and you and your really fit brother were going to Pizza Hut, what would we have? What's your order? What's your go to order? I mean, there was a pizza that they used to do when I was a kid called the Ultimo Combo, which I think was a sort of like, I definitely remember feeling a huge amount of angst when I saw Babe Pig in the City because I'm pretty sure that pizza was most of Babe. Yeah. Yeah. Parceled up and thrown into various spice mixes. And so we would eat. Yeah, we'd have the Altimo combo with a stuffed crust and then just go absolutely hog wild on the ice cream factory. It's the idea that you can actually go up and make your own sundae.

18:44Like, I think that is the ultimate childhood experience. I think that parents spend so much money trying to take their kids on these amazing things. Euro Disney and stuff bankrupting themselves. It's just, it's the ice cream. It's the word factory. Yeah, it's the word factory. It is testament to the pervasive influence of capitalism that even our ice cream has to be coloured by industrial manufacture. Like we still have to bring some element of like working class suffering even into this ice cream. It was basically like Steve Jobs looked at Willy Wonka and was like, we can take this one step further.

19:24Do you think that your parents had a good time? I think that my parents enjoyed how much we were enjoying ourselves, but I imagine it was torture. I wouldn't say that my parents were thrilled by the pizza, but I would say they had a good time watching how good a time we would have.

19:51So you began gigging during your time in Durham Uni's comedy company, the Durham Review, it was called. And then in your 20s, you moved to West London. Your housemates and social circle included Ed Gamble, Rose Matafeo and others who now make up UK Comedy's most successful squad. it sounds incredibly glamorous to me.

20:21Sorry, have I said something funny? Oh my God. Take me back to this flat that you lived in with the cream of UK comedy. Did you cook together then? We cooked together and I'm doing air quotes around together. What I mean by that is Ed cooked and I would often be there once we had a party. Is Ed a cook? Ed is a fantastic cook. I mean, once we had some people over and Ed made pulled pork and like did the whole thing with the rub and like slow cooked it for ages. And he left me in charge of bread rolls. And I actually got taken off bread duty because he said that my slicing was inadequate and he removed me from bread duty.

21:03So I got, I mean, we had a great time in that flat because I'd worked for years. so like doing what like so many different jobs I was at office temp for years the difficult thing about stand-up is that when you start you're essentially signing up for an unpaid apprenticeship with no fixed end so for some people they get work very quickly and for some of the rest of us you have to spend an amount of time where you're not earning anything from stand-up I couldn't do bar work because it was at night. Yeah. So that's out. Also, you can't even slice a bread bowl. Yeah. I don't know what bar, I'd get fired from cheers.

21:46Like it would have been a disaster, but I just had a string of office temp jobs. I would do anything as long as I could get out at five and it wasn't particularly taxing because, you know, some of the more extreme things I've done include like taking a coach back from Leeds overnight, going home, having a shower and then going straight to work. Like I've done, you know, I remember once I did a gig in Cambridge and got the train, like a late train back and like slept for an hour and then had to go to work. And so there was this period when I was doing both of those things. And then when I moved in with Ed, it was around the time I had one year where I was working two or three days a week.

22:29And then I got rid of all my day jobs. Were you partying quite a lot in that flat? Ed and I talk about this quite a lot now. And I think if he and I drank in the volume and with the frequency that we did when we were 21, we would both have long expired. Like, you know, when you're 20, 21, you don't think anything of it. You know, when we were at university, we were writing sketch shows and we would work all day. and then we would just go straight to the pub and we'd be there until one or two in the morning. But 21 is a sweet spot, isn't it, where you can just drink and then you can literally have a strategic vomit.

23:11Yeah. And then just carry on. And you get up in the morning and feel like hell, but then you have something to eat and you're fine. And then you suddenly, like I used to have the sausage and bean bake from Greg's. I used to get sausage and bean bake. Oh. And then within half an hour, you're absolutely. So now it's like, Hangover for me now in my mid-30s is this kind of, it's a sort of day-long, you know, Werner Herzog movie. It's so dark and bleak. Just lying there, breathing, just sweating alcohol and thinking existential doom-laden thoughts. So it was Greg's Sausage Bakes. Again, no idea how they do it, but sausage, cheese and bean, and then they bake that, and we used to eat that, but we just used to eat just so much shit.

24:00And also we used to drink Guinness. Like that was particularly for Ed and me. Tom Neenan, who is a great comedian and comedy writer and who I still work with today, it was also in the same sketch group with us. And he used to call me and Ed the one more boys because neither of us had the capacity. It would always escalate and often Neenan would get dragged into it, but it would always escalate into and culminate in one more at 11pm, which would then turn into three more. Are you a one more boy now? I'm less of a one more boy now. I've still got it in me. I've still absolutely got it in me. I was reading that you said that during that period of your life, talking about mental health, things got a bit spicy, which I think is a wonderful way of saying things.

24:50But go on, please explain. No. It's just a time that everybody who does a sort of, I think probably everyone who does any job, but certainly everyone who does a creative job, goes through a period where it's the bit that gets skirted over a lot in people's autobiographies. For me, it was like sort of five solid years in my mid-20s where I was just in a cycle of being drunk and hungover. and you do feel like you've bought a bunch of magic beans. Yeah. Because if you tell people, I'm a comedian and I'm doing comedy and they say, what else do you do? And you're like, well, I also have an office job five days a week.

25:35And they say, why? And you say, because I literally make no money from it. You really feel like this guy sold me these beans and he seemed cool. Yeah. And you can feel really delusional. Did people worry about you when you were like that? Yeah, friends of mine definitely worried about me. Tom Neenan and his now wife, Ali, got married two years ago, and I was best man at the wedding. And when you're writing the speech, you want to talk about how important these people have been in your life, and you don't want to bum the audience out. So one of the things I was trying to do was like, because when do you get to say nice things about your friends in that sort of context, was trying to walk the line of not spoiling everyone's fun time, but also acknowledging and thanking them for being quite supportive of me at a difficult period.

26:25And I certainly think there are stories, there are stories that Tom and Ali find less funny than other people. Yeah, because they saw you at absolute rock bottom. Yeah, yeah. And they were sort of, you know, they were certainly concerned about me in that period.

26:47you met your girlfriend amy annette during what we're calling the spicy period correct yeah how did life change then did she come in and change things as women sometimes do she i'll tell you what what it is what the biggest thing is the biggest thing is if you are in a relationship with somebody, there is some scrutiny on you. And I think as soon as there is some scrutiny on you, it forces you to think, well, why am I doing this? But the biggest thing that she did was she was just like, why don't you just calm down? Like that was, it wasn't like she, there wasn't like a montage where she like bought me better suits.