Review: Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe at The Rechabite
Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe at The Rechabite
Sunday, April 27, 2025
British comedian Nish Kumar returned to Australian shores and marked a triumphant Perth debut with his solo show Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe. With a withering series of attacks on the ruling classes, their enablers, and the corrupting influence of billionaires over the past twenty-five years, Kumar gave an impassioned, urgent, yet still comedic voice to the audience’s innermost fears and furies.
Kumar opened with a lament for the loss of good brother Rishi Sunak in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, then riffed on the British Indian experience of being told—often by well-meaning white journalists—that there should be pride in representation, even if it came in the style of a former investment banker.
Kumar pivoted across the Atlantic and stated that Trump likely couldn’t differentiate between the South Asians in his own government and the Mexicans he continues to demonise, that the diaspora in the United States would soon be as disappointed as those over the pond, and that marginalised communities should not get ahead based on the oppression of other minorities.
Not that token representation mattered all that much, Kumar continued, as white supremacists are back with a vengeance, and their most public proponents reminded him of the cockroaches awkwardly settled into human skinsuits from Men in Black. Kumar queried why there couldn’t be attractive neo-Nazis, because if there were, he might have actively considered their points.
Kumar viscerally unleashed on those in the comedy sphere he saw as quisling-style collaborators to these extremists, whether due to blatant transphobia, through opening for Trump rallies, or an attempted rehabilitation of Hitler’s reputation focused on his time as an artist. Another well-known figure Kumar described as a ham sculpture in the shape of Fantastic Four’s The Thing.
His agent had told Kumar not to name names, but he did so both with aplomb and relish, all while verbally bracketing these sprays with tightly scripted legalese obviously approved by a defamation lawyer. Kumar is a very cheeky boy, and he revels in it.
References flew by at warp speed—Prince Andrew, the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the Queen Mother’s crown, the impression given by Kumar’s education that Britain had only done “cool shit” during the years of The Raj, along with an observation that Charles’ coronation had exhausted all the cultural cachet the country had gained from creating Fleabag.
Local content made it into Kumar’s set easily and organically. Charles remaining Australia’s head of state, Gina Rinehart, preferential voting—linked to Luigi Mangione, of all people—the Voice referendum, and what a ‘rechabite’ possibly ever was—all got a guernsey on the night.
Whether he was talking about the Reichstag Fire, Tenacious D, or the world no longer wanting to care about late booths reporting from outside Atlanta every four years—the pace at which Kumar deployed his words, his attention, and indeed, his venom, was at times dizzying. It was as if twice the show was packed into half the time, with the audience certainly getting its money’s worth. If one took a moment to breathe, another five jokes whizzed by—Kumar is certainly a performer that requires concentration, as he himself freely acknowledged.
Perhaps two-thirds of the way through the evening, Kumar admitted this was not an act, nor a persona, and, in his own opinion, there is not even any art to what he does. He is this intense, this loud, all the time—sometimes with a paying crowd in attendance, oftentimes not. With a volume and delivery akin to that of a category four cyclone, Kumar was almost his own extreme weather event, popping off every emergency alert in the vicinity.
When his topics were too ribald, which was often, Kumar deferred to an audience member in the front row, who reminded him of his mother—“sorry aunty”—and lightly apologised to all the plus ones, by this stage constantly startled, brought to the show by friends with some previous idea of his material.
Kumar ended with an attempt at escapist humour about the everyday, which he fervently wished to do more of, but where would it fit? Yet even this mild foray into minutiae led to thoughts of wage stagnation, the GFC, unresolved trauma, Gaza, the climate emergency, and a panic attack eight months ago related to the Stockport riots. Kumar concluded by detailing his mother’s gentle conversations about her move to Britain in 1973 and the victories over the racists then, which gave succour to the battles ahead now.
“You weren’t like this on Taskmaster,” Kumar anticipated the audience to retort, but this night, in the anointed temple of disgruntled hipsters, he had found those who accepted him as he currently is. Equal parts crippling anxiety and overweening arrogance, with a core of barely contained fury at injustice, Kumar is most definitely an artist of our times. We cannot wait to have him back in Perth again.
PAUL MEEK