Fair warning, certain parts of my adventure to see Omid are NSFW.
That means, don’t read this email at that school you work for.
I’m not paid for these reviews. Right now it’s a hobby.
On Saturday 3rd February 2024, I went to Liverpool’s UNITY THEATRE to watch Omid Djalili be his hilarious, wise self.
If you haven’t heard of Omid Djalili, you’ve probably still seen him in something. He’s done so much in one lifetime that I can’t make an honest attempt to list everything, so here’s his wikipedia page.
He’s a comedian, actor, and supporter of WOMEN, LIFE FREEDOM.
The Journey
I set off from Manchester to Liverpool in the early afternoon, believing I might score a decent seat on the train. For the journey, I had an aslant view of the opened customer toilets, and a straight ahead view of some trees. I chose to look at the trees.
I was travelling alone this time, as my friend Ruth couldn’t make it, so I had a spare ticket for the gig. I didn’t want to be that guy who has an empty seat beside him, so I tried to find friends in Liverpool who might be available.
I also had spare time. So, when I arrived, I got a pair of aviators from TKmaxx and a small Lego space set (affiliate link). I then made the trek up toward the bombed out church, passing innumerable hipster food joints and hipster clothing joints.
I resisted the temptation of a last-minute spenny burger and three-piece tweed suit, climing higher above Liverpool until I found myself on a quite posh-looking street. The businesses there had silver plaques at their doors and everything, and from these I was able to roughly triangulate my position as somewhere near a skincare clinic and somewhere near a lawyer’s office.
I was very excited, as I had wanted to see Omid for a long time.
I then listened to Google, and overshot. Rather than walking into the cathedral grounds and picking up a new religion, I pulled a sharp left, briefly standing confused with another man who also looked confused, but who was just waiting for his date, and not a gig. I turned another left, coming across the Hope Street suitcases.
Here’s a picture of them.
The Hope Stree suitcases celebrate the many fabulous people and organisations that have come out of Hope Street, and Liverpool, in recent geological memory. They also make a fantastic hump-bunker, as I discovered when I saw two art critics trying to make a third art critic over the top of the monument under the pale streetlights in the minutes before I found the gig.
(I did initially think they were homeless people, but a friend pointed out that it is not only homeless people who reproduce on monuments in Liverpool, and that many people, from lawyers to skincare clinicians, regularly reproduce atop monuments.)
Now, pulling one final left turn, ending my spiralling journey, I found the theatre at last.
The venue
The Unity Theatre is a beautiful little place with staff so friendly I briefly wondered if I’d sustained a head injury. I mean it, they’re brilliant. Whenever I’ve been (thrice now, I think) I wind up missing the place. It’s got a welcoming atmosphere and a crisp, modern look that makes you feel as if you’ve found something exclusive and secretive.
I let them know about my bonus ticket and asked them to give it away to anyone who showed up at the door wanting to get in.
I then bought a Pulp cider, which was very nice, and pre-ordered a second for the intermission. Here’s a real photo of me next to it.
The gig
First, a surprise. Omid had a warmup act for this show, the fantastic Boothby Graffoe.
A tall fellow with an almost psychic knack for crowd work, Boothby captured our attention from the very first moments with comedic song, and with improvised lyrics about a latecomer. His set mixed musical props, standup, crowdwork, and naughty songs into a relentless cocktail of hilarity that I wish lasted longer, much like real cocktails. It was fantastic. This is the sort of standup you’d happily tolerate a busy train to get to.
See him when you can.
Omid Time
As I said before, Omid Djalili is a comedian, actor, and supporter of WOMEN, LIFE FREEDOM. His show touched on all of these things, taking us from silly and energetic anecdotes to deeper, darker topics where, between laughter, we were given time for contemplative moments.
I’m always happy to sit front row in these smaller gigs because I find, like with university, most people are reluctant to do it because of some imagined pressure put upon them. Sure, there might be eye contact during a dark joke, you might be set more homework, but I can tolerate that. I’m also a fan, so to an extent I knew what to expect.
I did feel bad about the empty seat to my left, but it meant I got the best seats in the house. Full shoulder room, full wiggling space.
And there was wiggling. I laughed so much my head hurt. Each joke built upon the last and transformed its meaning in a way that made the whole set poetic. Ideas rhymed with other ideas from half an hour before, and the whole thing had a sort of extra dimension to it. It felt alive.
Omid warned us at one point near the start, in his usual modest fashion, that some of these jokes are very new.
I’ve met enough humble smart people in my life to have known from that moment they’d all be great. And they were.
Omid’s style is simultaneously intimate and theatrical, striking a perfect balance between micro and macro, between crowd work and talking about the larger, huge problems in the world.
The care with which he tackles the big questions in his performances leads us all to feel very comfortable in that space with him. You’re in safe hands. And you can tell from the way he crafts and then tells his jokes that he’s someone who cares a lot about the world, and about improving it through laughter, contemplation, and conversation.
He also has a lot of energy on stage, like a rock star.
Omid’s gig took us through the beginnings of his career, his experiences at the Fringe, and his misadventures. It covered footballers, his life, and the big problems plaguing the world right now.
And all of this was meticulously arranged, not in a direct sequence of lightest to heaviest, not in a shifting musical piece that gradually got darker near the end, not in a stage play that starts funny but suddenly gets serious, but in a carefully curated machine of words and ideas and images that came together to tell a story greater than the sum of its parts. It was a brilliant comedy show.
It was masterful.
A lot of you know I’m a big fan of art that balances the silly and the serious, and this was a masterclass in it. If I could, I would watch it again and again.
It was one of those gigs you remember days and weeks afterwards, one of those gigs which I think proves that comedy is an artform often beyond poetry and scriptwriting and other such subcategories of writing, because it is an active, living machine of words operated by its writer in real time. The set does not exist without its writer piloting it, and here it felt that Omid is the only person in the world who can tell these stories the way he tells them. He built the controls to this word-machine, and only he can operate it.
Basically, I liked the show.
Everything I like about creativity, about writing and art, happened inside this show. It was fantastic.
See him if you can.
Bonus Features
After the show I also had the privilege to meet Omid, which was fantastic. He thanked me for sitting in the front row, and I apologised for the empty seat I left beside me. See, sitting in the front row is important.
You might not expect this, but sometimes I’m awkward when I meet new people. I’m confident, sure, but I’ve always related more to the aliens in fiction than the humans. Omid cut right through that, and I felt immediately like I’d known him for years. My relatively new social anxiety dissolved for a few minutes.
He’s a great guy. See his shows.
Follow Omid on Twitter > https://twitter.com/omid9
Follow Boothy on Twitter > https://twitter.com/madbadsadhad
This post marks the first of my written comedy reviews. You may have heard Ruth and I cover Daliso Chaponda’s BBC show Citizen of Nowhere a few months back on ALLfm, and I’m now accompanying those radio reviews with these written ones, to broaden their audience.
I might be on air again on Sunday 25th Feb, that’s this coming Sunday. I’ll beam out an update if that’s still the case on Saturday.
This was an independent review. I have not been paid for this, but I do have a tip jar that enables me to keep putting time into the writing here. This is, at present, my only writing gig. Aside from those book things.