When you get more laughs from riffing off your audience in the first five minutes then you do for the whole rest of your show, you know something’s wrong. Indeed, the greatest achievement in Mirza’s show is that he epitomised the very worst of observational and character comedy.
Mirza portrays a variety of characters in this show, all of them Pakistani. These include a halal meat fast food shop owner and a Muslim Cleric called Abu Hamsta. While these characters are different, the jokes they both told were too long, too reliant on obscure and bizarre references and too often ended with a damp squib of a punchline. While the costumes and voices may have changed, the style and indeed quality of comedy did not and each character is another nail in the show’s coffin, with your hope of anything better coming along waning gradually throughout, until you wish you had brought a more exciting watch, so often will you be looking at it. Various situations Mirza talks about, such as being searched at American airports on account of his ethnicity, or the ‘peculiarities’ in Sharia law and how it is viewed in Britain, have become tired subjects at best. Not that they can’t be funny, but Mirza’s decision to simply repeat jokes and retell stories and situations that have been batted around comedy circuits for years means that he has to try and do something new with this material and he simply doesn’t.
Many comedians struggle with their delivery and that is indeed a key part of the show. Mirza’s problem, however, was slightly more worrying in that the weakness was in his material, which simply was not funny enough, or even edgy enough to warrant laughs for shock value. The main issue in this instance was the failure to do the most basic thing: write funny jokes and deliver them in a funny way. Mirza’s material was flimsy and disappointing, and his deliveries, whatever hat he had on or shirt he was wearing, were all poor as well.
