Viv Hardwick talks to Shappi Khorsandi about finding the funny side of friendship and motherhood

TV COMIC Shappi Khorsandi has a coughing fit when we discuss how she manages to tour with a young son, a baby daughter and, as she likes to call her touch of cold, “the plague”.

“My daughter, Genevieve.” is nine months old, she is really cute and she finds me very funny to hilarious. However, this is an audience which likes me playing peek-a-boo behind my hands. I think if I tried that on tour, the ticket-buyers would sit a bit stony-faced and say ‘What do you know?’”

Khorsandi will manage her only visit to the North-East, at Stockton’s Arc next Thursday, with the help of her mother baby-sitting. “I sort of work it out when I’m touring. I have amazing neighbours, and child care, and my mum, and I think I don’t do as many gigs as I would if I didn’t have children. I just do enough to keep my children in royal jelly which is what they are fed on. I prefer working places where I can get home quickly... because a hideous, horrible thing happened to me called school. I can’t take my daughter with me and not my son, so I end up on the road childless,” says the award-winning London-based standup.

The three – her six-year-old is called Cassius – returned recently from Melbourne following a three-week visit. Asked how she coped on 24- hour flights with two small children, Khorsandi jokes: “They were golden. I had a few tantrums, but they were okay. Maybe they are fine because they have me for a mother and they know they have to be fine otherwise the whole system would collapse,” Khorsandi says.

“But, sadly, the whole comedy industry doesn’t revolve around my childcare needs,”

adds the woman who has just finished filming some Comedy Central spots for TV and has several radio projects ahead. The Iranian-born best-selling author of A Beginners Guide to Acting English and BBC Radio 4 regular is again planning to join the hundreds of comics in Edinburgh this summer, but remains somewhat elusive about the content for Shappi Khorsandi Live.

“If you do a show it changes from month to month anyway. In the past, my shows have been very themed and this one isn’t. This is me doing what I like, which is infinitely more fun.

But, this is none of my old stuff.

“I’ll be talking to the Stockton audience about what has happened to me in the past 12 months. Quite a lot about being single and pregnant I guess,” she says.

I ask if the second pregnancy was planned because her first inspired the tour Moon On A Stick and was based on separating from husband Christian Reilly and becoming a single mother of one.

“It’s the way my life has panned out. It wasn’t like a big plan. I was pregnant without a boyfriend and I had my daughter. Now that she is here I don’t genuinely think about why I was single and pregnant. She is just here and now, and she may or may not have a dad in the future.

I don’t know, but she doesn’t want for anything,” says Khorsandi.

I ask whether the situation is going to inspire a sitcom or another book in future, but she feels that might make her come across as a bit cynical. “When male comics talk about children, people find it charming, but I don’t think that babies, childbirth and stuff aren’t what people want to hear from me,” she says.

Khorsandi says she wants to move the debate on now from her Iranian roots and prefers not to become involved in the current fingerpointing about Muslim faith schools. “I can’t begin to tell you how much I don’t care about this stuff anymore. Getting older, I like to talk about things that are relevant to me, but when it’s gone, it’s gone. I did a show about an exboyfriend and now I can’t even talk about him socially anymore. I purged the subject. Some people come along to my shows expecting lots of things about Iran, but I don’t do that now. I care so much less about cultural identity and I certainly don’t want my children to have any kind of identity issues. My family, by and large, are non-believers. Religion played no part in my life and sometimes, because of where I was born, I’m expected to speak on this issue more than anything else.”

Changing the subject, she teases me by saying that she prefers to chat about anything that isn’t related to the jokes in her show. “Right, and you can quote me about having a really good take on faith schools,” Khorsandi says.

Her preparation for a tour involves lots of post-it notes all around the house suggesting subjects she might like to talk about.

“The main thing that came out of that concerned my best friend, who I have known for 35 years and two women couldn’t be more different.

I wondered if we’d met today whether we’d have had that connection and be close friends without the test of time. I asked her this and she said, ‘I don’t know, I couldn’t possibly imagine where I’d meet you’. So there’s a lot of my friendship with her in my show.

We are so different. She’s a scientist. I lived with her once and I invited the neighbours around for tea and she said, ‘What are you doing? I managed to avoid knowing their names for ten years and now you’ve come along and ruined my life’,” she says.

Khorsandi thinks that the “ignoring the neighbours” attitude is more to do with living in big cities like London. Even so, she is so close to her neighbours that they call their road Ramsay Street.

“I moved in last February and my next-door neighbour is Mags and I was so friendly with her by June that she gave me my post-caesarean injection. I found a mobile phone in the street and worked out which house it belonged to. It helps that we have children at the same school. That creates a community.

“When you have kids you need back-up and you get to know your neighbours.”

On the subject of children, Khorsandi discovered in Australia that her son had heard 40 minutes of her act.

“The lady looking after him thought it was okay to bring him into the show and I made a joke about him and asked ‘He’s not in here is he?’ and he went ‘Yeah’. I can’t begin to tell you the things that he’d heard me say. We’re going to have to talk about all that in therapy.”

  • Shappi Khorsandi, Arc, Stockton, Thursday, May 8, 8pm. Tickets: £14. Box Office: 01642-525-199 or arconline.co.uk