‘Let me tell you something more about my miserable life,” says Usman Khalid, with a miserable face. Then he pauses, and twinkles: “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” Well, why would you go to see refugees performing standup comedy? Displacement, migration, sanctuary – these are not hilarious subjects. If we think about them at all, it’s usually with bleeding hearts. Or worse. “The media discourse,” says comedian Tom Parry, “is, ‘Oh these poor refugees, they need our help’, or ‘God, these refugees coming over here [and sponging off us]’… But both responses are dehumanising. Whereas there’s nothing more human than laughing with someone.”
Parry – of the sketch trio, Pappy’s, and award-nominated for his solo work – is coach to No Direction Home, a collective of refugees and migrants learning standup comedy. It’s Refugee Week this week, and the outfit are presenting three gigs, the third with Nish Kumar headlining. Parry gets his mates involved, and those big-name headliners – Romesh Ranganathan fronted their Southbank Centre gala last summer – lead masterclasses for participants, too. The programme is thriving in the age of Zoom, on which Parry now leads three weekly workshops to a burgeoning intake. “None of us,” he says, “can believe how successful it’s been.”
I can vouch for that: I played a role in bringing No Direction Home into being. In 2018, the venue I co-run, Camden People’s Theatre, staged a festival of performances about refugeeism. We made contact with the charity Counterpoints Arts, scoping how we might work together. They suggested a standup course or event – for which they perceived a hunger among their migrant and refugee community. “But what we needed was somebody to run the workshops,” says Tom Green, who produces No Direction Home for Counterpoints. “That person was going to be crucial.” I invited Parry – a director as well as a sketch and standup act – to come onboard.
A call-out was duly circulated. “And straight away we had eight or 10 people,” says Green. “They were very shy to begin with – but they really wanted to do it.”
I attended the first workshop, where, skilfully encouraged by Parry, these amateur clowns from Iran, Somalia, Sudan and beyond took their first steps in comedy. “Tom told them, ‘Don’t try to be funny. Try to be interesting,’” Green remembers. “And what we definitely have in the group are a lot of really interesting people.” “After that first session,” says Parry, “I just knew: this is really going to work.”
A few weeks later, I was at the first gig, too, at CPT – and, like everyone else present, I was blindsided by how good it was. Khalid was on the bill, a refugee from Pakistan with his own coffee-shop business and an expert line in hangdog humour. So, too, giggling self-deprecator Majid Adin, whose satirical illustrations precipitated his flight from Iran. Tewodros Aregawe, who fled Eritrea as a teenager, losing friends on the Mediterranean crossing, had since become a performer with the theatre company, Phosphoros. His cocksure standup was a first-night highlight.
What’s so striking about the group is the wide variety of comic sensibilities, and how capably, after only a few hours’ tuition, they deploy them. “What you get from people who’ve never considered this as a career,” says Green, “is a freshness, a directness and honesty – and a connection with the audience that’s amazing. There’s some really fantastic talent out there. Which raises a broader question about who gets the chance to be a comedian – about who could do it, given the chance.”
More than that, No Direction Home bucks the stereotype of the tragic refugee, a figure only ever allowed to be silent and powerless – or grasping and malign. No Direction Home complicates that picture – by blurring the line between refugees and migrants more widely, and allowing them to represent something beyond their own fraught circumstances. “At that first gig alone,” says Green, “we had people talking about dating or food or their grandmother or being bombed in their home country or crossing the Channel. It’s a full range.”
Then there’s the fact that, with a microphone in their hand, the performers’ status relationship with their hosts (who has to listen to whom) is momentarily upended. “There’s so many assumptions around who refugees are,” says Green, “that to see people presenting on their own terms about what they choose to talk about is really affecting. The power and agency of that is fantastic.” Says Parry: “The gigs end up feeling like a celebration. They’re really special.”
Only 18 months into the programme, the aim now is to keep welcoming newcomers, while supporting those acts with professional ambitions. The collective had secured their first Edinburgh fringe dates this summer – until coronavirus intervened. Selam Mengistu is a second-generation Ethiopian immigrant who took up comedy after seeing No Direction Home at CPT a year ago. On 21 June, she’ll be gigging with Nish Kumar. “It’s always been something I’d wanted to do,” she tells me, “but I was terrified of doing it. I’d never have tried standup at an open-mic night. I only considered this because it was aimed at people from migrant backgrounds, who would not normally have this opportunity.”
Now telling her own jokes for a living no longer seems an impossible dream. “I’m not trying to be on Live at the Apollo just yet,” says Mengistu. “But I am interested to see where this might take me.”
* No Direction Home are performing online on 16 June with Mo Omar, on 19 June with a yet to be announced headliner, and on 21 June with Nish Kumar.