Bashing Nish

Nish

I can imagine a fair few eyes rolling, eyebrows raising and lips curling when they see that an article in today's The Times headlined Double standards of the smug liberal left has a byline naming Matthew Parris. But it's a fine piece.

What got grumpy Matthew's goat this time was a BBC comedian, The Mash Report's Nish Kumar ("a thirtysomething leftie stand-up comedian educated at a super-selective Kent grammar school and Durham University"), using the Index on Censorship’s annual “Freedom of Expression” awards ceremony to attack one of the newspapers funding it. Guess which one? Yes, every BBC comedian's most time-honoured target, OMG The Daily Mail. 

Matthew accused Nish of "going for the laughs he gets easily among the audience he presumably targets", and called his "diatribe" "intellectually flimsy", "barely coherent" and "smug and sanctimonious". (I can probably guess what you're thinking there!).

MP's piece ends:

Have I been too hard on Mr Kumar? He’s only a poor stand-up doing his nut, trying to earn his keep by milking laughs from an audience. But if, on an evening devoted to defending others whose stand-up is of another kind — a stand-up for freedom — and who by standing up risk torture, imprisonment and death . . . if on such an evening you suppose that you and your mates’ fashionable dislike of the Daily Mail is in the same frame, is on the same planet, as these brave souls, then something has dislocated in your world view.

Ah but, Nish didn't get where he is today by not pandering to his and his mates' fashionable dislike of the Daily Mail. (Or Brexit. Or Trump. Or Boris and Gove. Etc.)

Maybe that's on the application form to be a BBC comedian: "Do you dislike the Daily Mail enough to write endless jokes about it?". If you tick 'Yes', you'll be on a BBC panel show in no time, and might even get your own show. If you tick 'No', you're instantly shot, attached to a concrete post and dumped in Salford Quay where not even the most politically-correct BBC drama detective will ever find you.