Review by Steve Bennett

This is not so much a comedy show as an awkward religious studies lesson led by a patronising teacher who occasionally bursts into something cringe-worthy like a Skippy The Bush Kangaroo impersonation, to everyone’s embarrassment.

Jeff Mirza’s been a comic for more than 16 years, but he struggles to structure a show, or create jokes that emerge naturally. He cracks a few dated Seventies-style pub gags about three people of different nationalities who go to heaven, or asked to quote on decorating, or asked a simple maths question – then places them near some rudimentary story from one of the world’s major religions and thinks it’s job done.

One of the early gags is ‘this guy was half-Afghan, half-Mexican… he wanted to blow himself up, but couldn’t be arsed’. Two dreadful stereotypes for the price of one there. That the jokes are so lazy is odd as Mirza seems well-intentioned about spreading the best messages from religion, and not just his own Muslim faith. He’s always respectful, but struggles to make them funny.

For example, he recounts the story from the Koran of Muhammed going to the Cave of Hira, where he received his first revelations from Allah. It’s told straight, but just with a modern idiom – a random mention off a Crème Egg among his food supplies for instance – while the Prophet speaks with a Yorkshire accent and his wife with a Geordie one. It seems Mirza’s seen Eddie Izzard and tried to give that style of warped storytelling a go, without really understanding it.

Speaking of influences, he may well have seen Bill Hicks's routine about the cross being the last thing a returning Jesus would want to see, as Mirza, too, questions the idea of the means of his execution becoming a religious symbol. Meanwhile his take on the Virgin birth is, fairly predictably, to have Mary and Joseph on the Jeremy Kyle show. It would work as a quick line, but here he acts it out (badly) in a sketch that goes on far too long.

His delivery style is generally stilted – you still wouldn’t call him a natural after all these years. He also has a verbal tic that makes him inadvertently sounds like David Brent: ‘A man wrote a book, yeah? And the book was called the Satanic Verses, yeah? And the man was Salman Rushdie, yeah?’ And that’s a verbatim quote starting a long explanation of why some Muslims were offended by the novel. There’s a payoff that gives some insight into his conflicted father, who wanted to read the controversial but didn’t want to buy it, but you wouldn’t call it funny.

Elsewhere, the presentation is just plain weird. And never more than when he opened the show as Muammar Gaddafi, which basically involved shouting a lot before observing that Edinburgh has big seagulls. What?

Jumbled thinking runs right through this. Mirza’s heart is clearly in the right place, but his head isn’t. Some of the religious stories are quite interesting if you haven’t heard them before and there’s one or two decent gags, but this hasn’t got the satirical edge or – frankly – the humour to work as a show at all.

Jihad translates as ‘struggle’, and Mirza is certainly doing that.

Review date: 28 Aug 2011
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett