Nish Kumar - Failure Is Information. Comedians Call It Material.

0:00This is what I can't resolve the contradiction of. Again, I am a people pleaser, but I also love winding people up. I don't think enough people talk about how much of their personal ambitions have been motivated by rage. You are addicted to anxiety. Hello and welcome to How To Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that believes all failure is data acquisition. And today is such a brilliant example of putting that into practice. Before we get started on this episode, please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation.

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1:38$15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. When Nish Kumar was growing up in Croydon, South London, the child of Carolyn immigrants, a teacher at his school solemnly told his parents he would one day be prime minister. When Kumar instead went into stand-up comedy, later becoming an acclaimed TV presenter and podcaster, he recalls his parents thinking that this product has not met its guarantee. But number 10's loss is culture's gain. After starting comedy at Durham University with peers including Ed Gamble, his first solo stand-up show came in 2012.

2:17His fan base grew over the following years, aided by frequent TV panel show appearances. where he became known for his impassioned political progressiveness. By 2017, he was hosting the topical BBC comedy show The MASH Report, which ran to great acclaim until it was abruptly cancelled in 2021. But more on that later. Kumar now co-hosts the popular podcast Pod Save the UK and his 2026 tour, Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy, tackles the existential angst and political disquiet of a 40-year-old man. Sometimes on bad days, Kumar says, I feel as if I've let my younger self down, like I've fallen short of my ambitions for the type of person I wanted to be.

3:04Then on better days, I think all I wanted to do was get inside the TV. And I've done that because deep down, I am still that obsessive, strange, loudmouth geek. Nish Kumar, welcome to How to Fail. I feel like I've left my body. It was like an out-of-body experience being present for that being present. Was it like a eulogy? It was like a eulogy. Do you actually feel that you've let your parents down? I mean, I guess I did for a while, largely because they told me. It wasn't something I had to cleverly infer. I think they were very, very confused by my choice of occupation. and I think part of that is sort of this a lot a lot of that is motivated by fear because if you're a um you know an immigrant the classic first generation immigrant the the premise of what your life is supposed to look like is you are supposed to come to a country and do some job any job whatever job you have and that is supposed to enable your um children to then have a better life.

4:17But there is this kind of... So when we were growing up, when I say we, I mean the children of first-generation immigrants, we would complain that our parents didn't want us to have any fun. We would say that our parents had too narrow a view of what was available to us in this country. But in reality, I think what they were doing was a kind of fear-motivated thing. If you think about the jobs that people say immigrant parents want their children to do, it's always, what is it? It's doctor, lawyer, accountant. Those are three things that countries can't really do without. Right. And the premise of the choice of jobs that first generation immigrants want for their children is to do jobs that are so necessary for the country that you're in to function that they can't kick you out.

5:03that's essentially what they're trying to do they're trying to they're sort it's a kind of attempt to force integration and so I think it was very fear motivated and this idea that and also we don't come from you know there's no show business there's sorts of actually is now you know my one of my cousins in India has been in Bollywood movies and another one is a singer and so there in my generation there is weirdly now some show business in my family but we that's not our thing in general so they were sort of I think they were confused I think they were scared definitely and I think they were definitely confused now my argument to them has always been you should not have been confused because if you actually reflect on what I was like as a kid I was never going to do anything else when I was a kid all I wanted to you know all I did was I actually remember when I was a child when the BBC got the rights to the Simpsons I stayed in all day just because I was like, I don't want there to be a chance of me missing The Simpsons when it starts on the BBC.

6:08There was no chance. I wasn't being invited to anything. I don't know why. I was just like, I've got to be here. And you used to read books about how they wrote Simpsons episodes. And I forced my parents to take us to see Goodness Gracious Me when they did a live tour in 1999 at the Hackney Empire. I don't think I turned 14 yet. And all I did was talk about comedy and think about comedy. If you met me at 14, you'd probably have a pretty good guess of what adult I'd turn out to be. It's one of my innumerable privileges that I had never thought of what you've expressed so cogently there, that immigrant parents want their kids to have a job that means they can't be kicked out of a country.

7:01Yeah, because we didn't think about it when we were younger. We thought that our parents just didn't get comedy or books. You know, a bunch of my friends are like novelists and screenwriters and comedians who all had immigrant parents who said, why don't you become a doctor or a lawyer? And we thought it was a failure of their imagination. But actually, it was a tactical thing. They knew that these things existed. You know, my parents are very cultured and cultural people. You know, they, you know, from when we were kids, my mum's favourite movie is The Deer Hunter. You know, like from when we were kids, the house was full of books and music.

7:38And so they're not blind to these things. But the tactic was maybe you could try and make yourself integral. And what I would say is in the last 15 to 20 years, I do have to acknowledge that they were correct on some fronts. You know, if you look at the Windrush scandal, that shows you how precarious. You know, the Windrush generation were a group of people invited to this country from the Commonwealth by the British government to help rebuild the country after the Second World War. And then they deported their children. You cannot get more important to the British state than the Windrush generation and that contribution that they made in the post-war period.

8:19And yet the government still deported their children. So when that happened, when the Windrush scandal happened, I remember thinking, yeah, my parents were 100 percent correct. I never thought we'd get to a place where in this country where now there are mainstream political parties that have seats in the Houses of Parliament where their policy is repatriation of immigrants. My therapist once said to me, she was answering a question of mine and she said, the problem is you have a paranoia because your parents were paranoid. And as you get older, you will have to understand that your parents were both paranoid and correct.

8:59So you have to try and reconcile those two ideas that the paranoia is unhealthy, but it is not totally unfounded. And that has kind of, that's been a really interesting journey to go on in the last kind of 10, 15 years. Yes, we're going to get more into that and what a mindfuck that must be, given some of the things that we're going to talk about. I wanted to mention your tour, which has the greatest title, Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy. You are renowned for being a really nice guy. And whenever I said you were coming on How to Fail, without fail, people would say to me, oh, he's really nice.

9:39Is that annoying? No. As an edgy comedian, is it? Is it ever annoying? You're just really nice. No, you know what's really weird? I remember when I was at university, I remember someone saying to me, God, the worst thing you can be in this world is nice. Because it suggests that you're boring and the worst thing you can be is nice. And at the time I said, yeah. And in my head I thought, oh, there's way worse things. Pedo. Fascist. Pedo, fascist, fascist, pedo. There's way worse things you can be than nice. Are you mad? I think it's very important to meet the world with kindness. One of the things I've learned from my partner of 14 years is that intelligence is really valuable, but intellectual intelligence is actually useless without emotional intelligence.

10:32I also think in terms of my my sort of status as a comedian feels really strange and part of the title of the show is alluding to the fact that in my day-to-day personal dealings I am I would actually say it's it's goes into unhelpfully nice I think there's good to be kind and it's good to be nice you must not be a people pleaser and in my like one-to-one interactions with people I am an obsequious people pleaser obsequious when everyone says he's nice the whole time You're like, yeah, because he's obsessed with everyone thinking he's nice. And so it is then strange that the comedy that I've done, it's about subject matter that was always going to upset people.

11:10It was always going to upset people that if you talk about politics or if you talk about the news or if you talk about race or anything. So it is really strange that a people pleaser has also done some of the most divisive comedy of the last kind of 10 years. Yeah. And but what's also fun is that I sort of the people that know my work sort of know it simultaneously from the MASH report and my series of Taskmaster, which both started in 2017. and if you ask Ed Gamble, for example, who's known me for 20 years, he will say the version of myself that I am on Taskmaster is the best representation of my real personality.

11:58So half of me is political tirades and the other half is man attempts to kick over water cooler and fails. And that's the real you? Yeah, and actually what I realise is the real me is the both of those things at the same time and so the title is kind of an allusion to the idea of like yeah this is i am both a burke and someone who knows about the news those two things are not mutually those two things are not mutually exclusive it's very that's analysis is very good i can completely relate to the the people pleasing overwhelm and then the need for your repressed anger to go somewhere. And for me, it comes out in road rage.

12:43It's a very, very comfortable road rage, always behind a sort of windscreen encased in a metal box. Like I would never actually be the person who goes out. You'd never get out of the car. No, I'd never do that. But I think it does that. And you've spoken a lot about rage and the importance of focused rage as an agent for change. And that can be part of being a nice guy. And it kind of has to be because you're protecting the people who need it. Yeah, I mean, I think rage as an emotion is sort of useless if it is an end in of itself. If you're being angry just to be angry, then nobody needs more of that.

13:21There's enough of that in the world. But if you can use your anger about something to motivate you to do something, then I think that that is... I also think that that is an undervalued commodity outside of politics, just in your professional life. I don't think enough people talk about how much of their personal ambitions have been motivated by rage. Like people always say things like, no, I just wanted to achieve because I love the work. And every time I see one of those people talking, there's a part of me that always thinks, fuck you. I know that there is something that happened that made you think, oh, OK, I'm going to show that.

14:00100%. Could not agree more. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Well, now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms.

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15:45Ask your teen's doctor or visit meningitis.com today. Sponsored by GSK. Okay, let's get onto your failures. Your first failure is your 2013 Edinburgh show. Yeah. That then got turned into an essay in The Good immigrant yeah okay tell us about this show now i'm about to say something that makes me sound like i'm trying to go on a kind of die river ceo hustle culture you are wearing the black t-shirt to be fair where's your huell is it are you sitting on it i would never consume huell even if no if my life depended on it if you cured all disease i would consume huell and that's the only circumstance i have no desire i hope this podcast is not more responsive it's not this will be the episode title it's a good point of difference i just think why in the name of god do you want to remove the pleasure of eating food why would you take that away from yourself what is there's nothing to look forward to if you don't have the dinner that you're planning in your head as you're recording a podcast of nish kumar so i'm just caveating this by saying that i know that this sounds like something that would be on a podcast with two men wearing t-shirts that's slightly too tight for them.

16:56But failure is just information. Yes. To a comedian, failure is data. Yes. And so at the minute, I'm in, so I start my tour in September and I'm going to Edinburgh to do a sort of work in progress version of this show. And so like I'm failing all the time and it's helpful and it's really helpful for me because that's how I know what's going to work. You know, part of the thing with standup is it's contrived spontaneity. And what you're really doing is repeating the same thing over and over again, but every time trying to make it feel to the audience that you're performing, it's a confidence trick.

17:33Like you're trying to make the audience feel like you're saying it for the very first time. But also they've paid, you know, up to£30, you know, when it goes into theatres, by the time it goes into theatres. So it has to be good. And the only way it can be good is by going through this endless process of failing. And we're very lucky. You know, I always think we're very lucky because friends of mine are novelists and I always think, you've written novels. I always think, how do you know it's good? You don't. You don't. I just rely on someone else telling me. That's where the people pleasing comes in.

18:10Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess you have editors who read it and you get feedback from them. Genuinely. The first time, for instance, that a joke bombed, did you still feel it then? did you still feel oh that's great dating no it's taken me 20 years yeah it's taken me 20 years and now not only is it it's not just a case of I it's not that I'm not emotionally robust because I'm not emotionally robust no one would ever describe me as being emotionally robust but it's more that I've just done it enough times that I now it's I was going to say I don't take it personally it's not even that I don't take it personally I sort of welcome it because you you go great that's great I know that that doesn't work.

18:52And so I either need to change something around or drop it entirely. The biggest learning curve for me, the most important thing I did was my show in 2013, which didn't work. It just didn't work. And in not working, it was miserable. I was so miserable. I did a two week run of it at the Soho Theatre and then I did it in Melbourne in 2014. And by the time I got to Melbourne in 2014, I was thinking, oh, dear, this is not working. So can I just interrupt? What's your definition of not working? Was it that people weren't responding or that there were no tickets sold? Or how did you measure that? You know what?

19:29Ticket sales weren't bad. It was more just people weren't responding. Sometimes it would go well. Then other times it would go bad. But a lot of the time it was just not working. The thing with stand-up is that everyone has good nights. If you're pretty decent at the job, everyone has a good night. you don't really write your shows for the good nights because if you're if the if the chemistry or atmosphere is right in the room anyone who has half a clue of what they're doing can have a good stand-up gig the reason you write it is for the nights the chemistry is not right you have to do it again and again and again so there are like any job you know there are days where you go into your job and you think i've absolutely i'm on this i'm nailing it and then there are days where you go into work and you think god damn it i just have to get to five o 'clock like i just have to get through this day and with stand-up the version of that is the spontaneity is not working the chemistry with the audience is not correct and then the thing that will save you is the writing and the thing that will carry you through those nights is your written material and also if you record the show that is just a test of the writing but 2013 I it's the most important show I did because I learned everything about what I didn't want to do in stand-up and I learned everything about what I'm how I come across on stage and I learned everything about what ultimately I wanted a show to look like and and the most important thing I learned was that you can't if you're making something and this is I think true of anything that like it's a book a film or whatever if I'm making something I've got to make it on the basis of I am doing this thing that I would like to see rather than I am doing something that I think will be successful.

21:19Yes. I have friends, I think, who understand instinctively what an audience wants. And that's great. But if you're not one of those people, you must not attempt to second guess what an audience wants. And you are better off making something for yourself that you would like to see and then hoping that other people like it. That's such a great distinction. and it sounds as though there was a piece there about removing a sense of ego and sort of how you wanted to come across and actually just like delved into who you were and what you wanted. That's definitely a big part of it for sure. It then became an essay in The Good Immigrant, is that right?

21:59So this seminal collection, which came out in 2016, edited by Nikesh Shukla. And so was that in your mind a successful repurposing? Totally. Yeah. And Nikesh contacted me and said, I'm doing this essay collection. And he said, I want you to write it about the subject matter of the show. I don't stand by a lot of the material in that show in any way. But the premise of the show was that somebody had used a publicity still of me and put it into a meme generator. It's a very early 2010s issue. But someone put it into a meme generator and the meme was confused Muslim. and I'm not a Muslim but I was very confused and the and so it was people making kind of using my face to sort of make Islamophobic remarks and I tried to turn that into an hour-long comedy show in the way that I thought you had to do to make something into an in inverted commas show I thought it had to have a kind of beginning middle and end and it had to and and the reason I was doing that was I thought that would that would be successful in Edinburgh and it would you know bring me to the attention of TV people and it would help supercharge my career I didn't think oh this would be this would be a good show you know I was making something that I thought would be received well rather than making something I know this sounds corny as hell something that is a real expression of something that I was desperate to put out in the world Yeah.

23:36And but then when Nikesh came back to me and suggested it as an essay, I was I said to him initially, buddy, I've got no interest in revisiting that crap. And but he said, no, I think it would really work. And so I kind of just put it together as a shorter essay and it worked so much better. And and it and it was really brilliant about The Good Immigrant. And what was very funny was when I read the book, suddenly some of these essays are really beautiful and some of them are really brutal and some of them are really scary. And my one has a two page diversion about Steve Carell's performance as Michael Scott in The Office.

24:14Because I don't really know what a good essay is because I'd never really written one before. I wasn't really wrapped up in how I thought it should have been perceived. That is so fascinating and says so much about the nature of failure and success, both in terms of failure being data acquisition, but also success being contextual, too, that sometimes the material needs to find its form. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sometimes, you know, you, you know, it's you. I think we're seeing this quite a lot at the moment. You know, I'm not I'm not going to single anything out. I'm not going to slag anybody off.

24:52But we've all in the last, I'd say decade, half decade, certainly sat down and in our three of 10 of a TV show or documentary thought this should have been a hundred minute feature. Yes. When when people who start stand up talk to ask me for advice now, I'm essentially like I'm trying to spend like shillings like the currency that I'm spending is no longer relevant. You know, it's it's a completely different world because of the way that, you know, algorithms and Instagram and stuff have come to dominate. and they now have to sit there and second guess what you know what out the algorithm is going to favor you know what subject matter is going to get your video promoted by the sort of invisible gods that nobody really understands and maybe and they will always be people that understand how to play that system i there are comedians i know that when i watch them do observational material, I think you are a real loss to politics.

25:54You would be a phenomenal political speechwriter because you have such an instinctive understanding. Peter Kay would have been a phenomenal politician. Genuinely, I'm not denigrating that as a skill. I think that that's an important part of, you know, you want a varied cultural diet. So that was 2013. We're now fast forwarding to 2019 for your second failure. which, as you put it, is the whole bread roll slash mash report fallout thing. The bread roll niche. I'm so sorry you experienced that. So you were doing stand-up at a charity gig. Yeah. It went bad because I brought up the sticky topic of politics.

26:42It was December 2019. We were probably about a week away from a general election. The gig went badly. So like by any discernible metric, I failed in my job, which admittedly I was not being paid to do, but I failed in my stated aim as a comedian in that room. Well, can I interrupt you there? Sorry. So would you consider your stated aim to be to entertain any audience that you find in a room? Or is your stated aim to do some good comedy that's also politically engaged? Now we're getting into the crux of the problem with my personality, right? Because if you ask me what the stated aim of a comedian is, I would say the stated aim of a comedian is just to entertain the people that are in front of you.

27:30But if you ask me really, this is what I can't resolve the contradiction of. Again, I am a people pleaser, but I also love winding people up. it's not that I like upsetting people is that I I can't stop myself if I think if something is going in my eyes badly or wrong I don't have the ability to just not acknowledge it that's sort of the problem because there's a version of that gig where you You just go, do 15 minutes of jokes about cricket and get off. I love cricket. It was a cricket charity. I love cricket. I could have talked about cricket for 15 minutes. It would have been very entertaining.

28:20But in reality, there was so much going on in the country at the time. You know, it sort of feels hard to talk about now because obviously, you know, five months later, we were all locked in our houses. So in some ways, some of it feels, it almost feels irrelevant to talk about pre-2020 stuff. But there was so much kind of, you know, going wrong at the time, you know, there's just a lot of very rich people in this room. And, you know, it was also a charity gig that was designed to help kids that, you know, have disabilities. Now, the disabled community in this country was ravaged because of cuts to social care that happened under the first coalition government in the early 2010s.

29:06you know it feels like an extension of victorian paternalistic charity culture to come together and talk about how we need to help which we do but not talk about the fact that there are you know political levers that have been pulled that have exacerbated difficult situations for disabled people living in this country so it but there is also a version where you go just do some jokes about cricket get off the stage why can't you just do that and the truth is i just can't i think there's two bits of my brain missing and one of them is that just ability to stop myself and the other bit of my brain that's missing is the bit that thinks i because like it's i love comedy and people love comedy and comedy writing but there are definitely moments where you stand up in front of an audience.

29:56I've never had a problem with that. The idea of like an audience of people looking at me, I've never had an issue with it. It makes all the sense in the world to me. And I've got friends that are conversationally very confident, who when they've had to do anything like that have said to me, I don't understand how you do that. It does not make any sense. Maybe that comes from observing yourself so much. Yeah. and sort of thinking about what makes you tick. And that's actually a form of empathetic intelligence, I would say. Yeah, I mean, the only problem with that is there's some comedians that are absolute wise.

30:35Yes, fair enough. But I'm not putting all comedians into that bucket. I'm just saying. Now, the bread roll. So someone threw a bread roll. What kind of bread roll was it? Do you remember? It was just a bog standard white bread roll. A corporate? Yeah, it was a corporate. It was in like a Mayfair hotel. And the thing that I will always maintain is that I have no problem. I don't think you should throw things at people generally. But I don't have a problem with them yelling at me. Like I really don't. Because I have that right to express myself. And they also have a right to express themselves. And when something happens in a room between a comedian and an audience, I think that that is there is an honesty to that.

31:20I think a big problem that we've got into with the sort of proliferation of camera phones is that things that happen in comedy clubs are being filmed, cut out of context and then being put on the Internet. And you don't really know what happened, you know, if you weren't in the room. Like you don't really know. There's certain things that, you know, like when Michael Richards went on that incredibly offensive racist rant, like regardless of the context, that's not OK. It doesn't matter how it doesn't matter what happened before or after that. The context is irrelevant because of what you said.