Top 40 Nish Kumar Quotes

There’s a fear when you’re a comedian of just being hectoring, so you do try to fight against that.

One of the things I’ve stopped doing is going out of my way to make people feel OK about their mistakes.

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.

You always appreciate it when people stick your neck out to support you.

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.

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.

Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face.

I wish sometimes I had a passion for hats and cheese and I could do a fun show about putting hats on cheese.

All comedy shows make me feel better about everything.

I consider it, the life of being a comedian – they have a right to boo me.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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’ve given up trying to reason with people who despise me.

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 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.

I wasn’t as cynical about Britain as a lot of friends of mine who are also people of colour.

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.

I just love buying myself presents. Is that a crime?

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.

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.

During the Brexit campaign there was a deficit of outrage.

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.

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.

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.

When refugees are at a distance it’s easy to be compassionate.

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.

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.

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’m quite good at Lego and Fifa, but they don’t translate in the real world.

We were in denial about the extent to which Britain had cured itself of the poison of racism.

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.

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.

I’m quite a prolific self-gift-giver.

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.

I have a Stratocaster, which is part of my long, doomed ambition to become Jimi Hendrix.

I’m interested in offence and why people take offence in certain ways about certain things.