US comic to take on 'self-righteous outrage after controversy

Aziz Ansari is playing a secret gig in London this weekend.

The comic will perform at the intimate Top Secret club in Covent Garden on Sunday night with a work in progress show.

He has been making a tentative return to stand-up in recent months following an #metoo-inspired article at the start of the year in which an anonymous woman described a harrowing date with him.

She claimed Ansari repeatedly pressured her into having sex, for which he later apologised. However the article’s publication sparked a debate into the line between sexual abuse and an aggressively bad date. 

A report in the New Yorker yesterday said that in his latest material Ansari tackles ‘self-righteous mass outrage [and] suggests that collective anger has overcorrected; now, rather than hold power to account, it targets the slightest and least consequential controversies’.

‘Everyone weighs in on everything. They don’t know anything. People don’t wanna just say, "I don’t know,"’ he has been telling audiences.

Like an increasing number of big-name comics, Ansari is banning mobile phones from his London show, insisting all device be locked into a supplied pouch. Anyone caught with a phone will be ejected. 

Tickets are still available here.

Published: 5 Oct 2018