Citizen Khan: They All Know Me | Gig review by Steve Bennett at IndigO2, London © BBC

Citizen Khan: They All Know Me

Note: This review is from 2016

Gig review by Steve Bennett at IndigO2, London

This is what you get with a live show spun off from a mainstream BBC One sitcom: an audience of all ages, from young children to pensioners. And because it’s Citizen Khan a far more ethnically diverse crowd than anywhere else on the supposedly inclusive main comedy circuit, too.

Adil Ray has never performed his character live before, and he’s certainly plunged into the deep end with a tour that tonight takes in none other than Wembley Arena. But what worked for Mrs Brown’s Boys and Still Game – both of which started as live shows – does not necessarily work for Sparkhill’s self-appointed community leader.

The TV show is unapologetically/shamelessly old-fashioned in its outlook, and so too here as Mr Khan, staking his claim to be a light entertainment host, indulges in segments based on Mr and Mrs, Brucie-era Generation Game or a pop quiz based on the Citizenship Test. This is a show with a lots of bits of business in place of material… though Khan is merely a functional host. When he asks the audience for suggestions, he doesn’t riff of what he gets but ignores it in favour of hearing unspoken comments for which he has the scripted response.

There are some gags, some of which may have come from a kids’ joke book (William the Conqueror was so called because he was good at conkers!) and others more grown-up, but no less clichéd (what’s the big deal with same sex marriage? He’s been married for 24 years and the sex is always the same). If he changed an abbreviation to include the word Pakistani once, he did it a dozen times. Ditto his trick of brining a camera into the audience to show us on the big screen. And as a VIP – Very Important Pakistani - he’ll shoehorn the word Asian into as many cheesy portmanteaus as he can… which could be seen as a sign of desperAsian, although there’s some charm to the persistence and the corniness.

Charm, however, doesn’t apply to his catch-noise: clearing the phlegm from his throat like a chain-smoking cat coughing up a furball. The disgusting hack (the noise, not the performer) gets a big laugh first time round, but never again, despite him persisting with it every other sentence right to the end. Would a more experienced live performer have stuck with it? I doubt it…

Another throwback to the past comes in a line of slightly uneasy jokes about Indians being slow, having stupid names and taking over parts of Britain to such an extent you need a passport to get into Leicester these days. Clearly there’s a context here of a Pakistani man teasing his neighbours, in the same way the English can joke about the French, but to white ears the actual lines aren’t far from a kind of humour we thought we’d left behind

Ray admittedly has a  tricky path to tread, playing both a mainstream white audience and a brown one who don’t get to hear representations of their experience in stand-up all that much – while trying to avoid being a Pakistani ‘Uncle Tom’. Certainly there was some archetypal behaviour he mentioned I wasn’t aware of, but some of the other material seemed like hackneyed stereotyping. It’s a fine line.

This may be an assumption of my own, but it seems this audience do not regularly go to comedy nights, and they seemed reasonably entertained by the show presented to them. If only they knew how much funnier, more original, more ambitious shows are out there.

Review date: 5 May 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

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