Guz Khan Live
Review of the Taskmaster and Man Like Mobeen star on tour
His many TV appearances suggest a larger-than-life personality. But in the flesh, Guz Khan is a comic with an innate, quiet charisma, able to have the audience hang on his every word, drawing people into his vividly portrayed stories. But he’s also quite careful with what he reveals.
His new tour, the first since his Taskmaster appearance propelled him into the mainstream, offers a limited, but engrossing, glimpse his life as a youngster in the late 1980s in a conservative Muslim family via a few extended self-contained anecdotes.
The most memorable of his recollections is of being forced by his school to make the same trip to bombed-out Coventry Cathedral, right on his doorstep, year after year. Until, that is, one teacher offered the forbidden fruit of Woolworths’ pick-and-mix as a literal sweetener to break the monotony… and a fellow Muslim pupil ensured they would never be invited back.
Khan is strong on detail, effective at introducing drama and jeopardy to his stories (possibly artificially), and skilled at conjuring up characters, from the questionable teacher to the equally questionable classmate. Then there are the big sisters who brought him up, but gave him no clues on how to talk to girls.
Early experiences with the opposite sex were clumsy and pressured. Khan very effectively puts us in his teenage shoes, nervously trying to make the big gesture to the first girl showing the slightest signs of interest. And when his mum got wind of that early, innocent relationship, she was decidedly unimpressed.
Even today Mrs Khan brings the same judgment down on her son, thinking stand-up a ‘ridiculous job’ and being beyond blasé about his first Live At The Apollo appearance. For his part Khan admits he had just two minutes of material for the show and styled it out, to great success. Yet there’s still a sense he’s making a little go a long way. Stories are often begging for stronger punchlines, and something going up someone’s arse is a payoff that arises with alarming frequency.
In his broadly traditional family, unbecoming behaviour that could be lead to them being considered harami was always a no-no. That’s why, even as a successful TV comedian, meeting women he believes to be prostitutes at the Mobo awards gets him hot under the collar. Literally, as it happens, as he blames them for him contracting Covid.
Though always engaging, there’s a feeling that in his stand-up Khan isn’t been fully able to exploit his fascinating past as a relatively devout and clean-living man but with a circle of friends that means he can belong to a WhatsApp group called ‘Mandem In Prison’. He probed that dichotomy more effectively in Man Like Mobeen, but it feels like he’s holding back here.
His are well-told stories, but there’s a more coherent, compelling stand-up show waiting to emerge from this. But he’s not quite as experienced in the craft as that his powerful stage presence and skyrocketing career suggests. Surely it’s hard to craft an impactful stand-up show while balancing the demands of a burgeoning TV and Hollywood career - including the Four Weddings and a Funeral reboot, Our Flag Means Death and the forthcoming Andy Samberg-fronted animation Digiman.
And the tour show takes frustratingly long to get going. Even after the interval, support act Kane Brown re-emerges for more than five minutes’ more banter; after which Khan picks up the baton with more to-and-fro with the audience. Then comes some relatively low-hanging political material about the likes of Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel letting the Asian side down by having the affront to be Tories, before Khan gets to the nub of his material.
His formidable, eloquent storytelling skills and youthful charisma go a long way and the night’s unfailingly entertaining. But it’s not got anything like the same impact as those age-inappropriate and formative Eddie Murphy stand-up videos his sisters let him watch as a kid…
Review date: 27 Jan 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at:
Northampton Royal & Derngate
