Addressing race related issues for an hour can potentially be very uncomfortable. Luckily, Nik Coppin is friendly enough to put his audience at ease immediately, even after insulting the birthplaces of most of them: ‘Slough? Oh shit, that’s rough’. Though Coppin isn’t always laugh-out-loud funny, he manages to make light of some pretty harrowing topics. Being mixed race, he firstly jokes that he receives abuse rather than acceptance from both sides, and it turns out that this abuse has been severe. Coppin’s stories always end with punch lines which belittle ignorant racists, but being threatened with stabbing has clearly strongly affected him, and this drives the whole show.
Lighter - although familiar-sounding – jokes about political correctness gone mad are reeled off more effortlessly, and Coppin’s close study of all the English accents given to evil characters in Disney films is impressive, as is his impression of Scar from The Lion King. Even amongst more frivolous jokes, though, Coppin makes interesting points. Political correctness can sometimes even result in exclusion, Coppin claims, and his impression of five Indian guys who confronted him at the end of the show because they had deliberately sat in the front in order to be picked on and felt overlooked is brilliantly refreshing.
Coppin isn’t always laugh-out-loud funny, and his tendency to evaluate longer stories after he has told them whilst explaining how well they have gone down before isn’t an amusing one. However, he does at least manage to leave us on an inspirational note. Retelling his feud with Peter Goers of Radio Adelaide, who wrongly referred to Coppin as a racist in a national newspaper - and gave his show minus four stars – Coppin departs by telling us not to take abuse from anyone. His determination won him his case against a Murdoch-owned newspaper and a ridiculous radio presenter, and we all applaud him for it. Coppin won’t necessarily blow you away, but he’s still well worth listening to.
