Shappi Khorsandi's latest show, Skittish Warrior – Confessions of Club Comic, is an enjoyable look back at the stand-up's 20 years in the comedy business. She starts by taking us back to when she was child refugee; her father, a poet and satirist, offended the clerics in Iran, and was even the target of an assassination gang in London.
Some of this material is familiar from previous shows, but no matter as her parents sound a hoot – although it's clear she didn't appreciate the disrupted sleep patterns she had from living in a household that was open all hours to other Iranian refuseniks and assorted bohemians. Her own children have a much more structured life now, she says, even at the risk of bringing up two people who try to be the boss of her.
She talks about the moment she knew she wanted to be a comic and being fired on to succeed in comedy after she saw other women being treated appallingly by club audiences, and having to overcome people's expectations of her, whichever box they put her in – BAME, female comic, single mother, whatever. She was once asked in a supermarket, with her toddler sitting in a shopping trolley filled with alcohol, if that was her daughter. She deadpanned: “She came free with these bottles of wine... which is the truth."
There's also a reminder of days of strippergrams and flashers in a pre-internet-porn world, and some good self-deprecating anecdotes about appearing on the Question Time panel, meeting Jeremy Corbyn and confusing him, how we look at nationality and belonging, and how Persian cats are the embodiment of an empire state of mind.
Khorsandi finishes with a very funny and revealing section about her appearance on the 2017 edition of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, where she was the first to be voted out by the public. But as she weaves her tale with some withering asides about fellow camp-mates, she makes a convincing case for actually being the winner.
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