'You're not entitled to that word,' says writer

Daniel Kitson has been called out for using a racist slur in his new stand-up show.

The Guardian's acting women's editor, Nosheen Iqbal, has taken issue with the comedian for using the word ‘Paki’ in one of his routines.

While she acknowledged that Kitson is no racist, she said that hearing the word being mentioned so casually on stage took her back to the terrifying racist abuse her family suffered in the 1990s.

‘I was winded,’ she wrote in an article last night. ‘My stomach knotted with adrenaline, my brain whirred replays and I couldn’t focus properly on the rest of the set. It was and it remains embarrassing to feel this hurt, this sensitive.’

The routine – part of his Something Other Than Everything show at the Roundhouse in Camden, north London –  was about changing attitudes to racism: how everyone at Kitson’s school called their the local newsagent ‘the Paki shop’, while the comic’s family had the sensitivity to refer to it as ‘the Sikh shop’. The joke being that it should have just been called ’the shop’.

But Iqbal said Kitson had no right to use the word at all, even in such context, and expect the few Asian people in his audience to separate the ‘intellectual construct from the emotional response’. 

She also wondered whether he would use the slur in front of a predominantly Asian crowd.

Iqbal concluded: ‘Even stand-ups trying to provoke and push boundaries aren’t entitled ownership of words that – even in context – are offensive.’

• Here is our review of the show

Published: 21 Jul 2017