Shappi Khorsandi: Shappiness is the truth

Shappi Khorsandi is a household name on the British comedy scene. She’ll be coming to Bozar to present her new show, Because I’m Shappi..., in which she talks about the friends, family, and total strangers who have helped shape her life.

"I wanted to be a doctor, but my parents pushed me into stand-up comedy," Shappi Khorsandi once joked on stage. As a little girl, she was forced to flee Iran because her father stepped on too many toes as a satirist. Today, she’s a well-known British comedian, praised for her sharp wit and her ability to effortlessly mix her British and Iranian backgrounds. “My personal life is very much present in my shows, and I’m not afraid to talk about it,” she says about her new show. “It can be very painful at times, but it is unavoidable in my line of work. My material has changed over time, depending on what stage of my life I was in. When I was newly divorced, all this raw emotion inevitably spilled over. And in my twenties I had a huge identity crisis about my nationality and where I belonged. But I grew up and got over it, and my work has gotten over it as well.”
“In the end, comedy is not what you talk about, but how you talk about it, how you draw people into the world as you see it. Many people in my audience are not single mothers with an Iranian background, but they can step into my world because of the way I talk about it. If I were an astronaut, it would be the same thing.”

The Belgian comedian Michael Van Peel was once given the advice to write about what angered him.
Shappi Khorsandi: Right now, I talk a lot about UKIP [the Eurosceptic, populist UK Independence Party – GDC] and immigration. As a kid, I used to be told to “go home”, and now plenty of Bulgarian, Romanian, and Polish children are hearing the same thing. That has an enormous impact on them. Issues like that automatically spill over into my work. But you have to relieve yourself of the anger and only keep the passion to make your stuff more powerful.

You have your own theory about why there are so few women in comedy. Men are better used to rejection, and that’s why there are more male comedians, you say.
Khorsandi: [Laughs] Yes. We women are not conditioned to deal with rejection, we tend to take it much more personally when the audience doesn’t laugh. I’ve seen so many brilliant young female comedians giving up after bad gigs. Of course, it would be an insult to my male colleagues to imply that they don’t feel such a rejection as deeply as girls do, but they tend to stick at it longer.

Society treats us very differently from the beginning. We praise “good little girls”, but we like it if a little boy is a bit of a “cheeky monkey”. It’s all the more obvious to me now that I have a baby daughter. Well-meaning adults give her Barbie dolls and tell her she’s a princess. But what if she doesn’t want to be a princess? I wasn’t a princess at all. I liked to be around my brothers, I read, I didn’t listen to boy bands, I had wiry hair, and I was fat. And everyone knows there’s no such thing as a fat princess.
Walking on stage and talking about yourself is a big step for a girl. I remember driving home with older male colleagues after a show, sitting mute in the back, afraid to say anything. But now I’m 41, and nothing and no one frightens me anymore. Mainly because I have no time to be afraid. [Laughs]

SHAPPI KHORSANDI • 31/1, 20.45, €26, EN, Bozar, rue Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-507.82.00, www.bozar.be