'Through comedy, I’m trying to be a solution in a crazy world': Omid Djalili interview

It's hard not to be at least occasionally serious when you are talking about terrorism. “They’re shooting soft targets,” he says at one point. “People on beaches, people in cafes in Paris. And I think we’re all part of it. We’re all partly responsible.”

The British-Iranian comedian has made a career out of allowing audiences to laugh in the face of difficult subjects: the tensions between Islamic extremism and Western culture, between the Middle East and here. So of course, there is going to be some "serious".

The other thing is, Djalili hasn't actually attempted to be funny during our conversation. In fact, he insists he “will never ever try to be funny in a Scottish-based newspaper because the Scots are funnier than the English”. He knows that, because he is married to a Scot who is much more funny than him. “A hundred times more,” he says of wife, actor and writer, Annabel Knight. “She makes me laugh every single day in that biting Scottish way. Her family always joke that ‘Omid’s funniness is legendary’, and by legendary they mean it’s missing.”

“Once,” he recalls, “she was angry with me and she was going to insult me by calling me a fat something and she said, ‘You fat ...’ And she realised that was enough. That was the most cutting thing I’ve heard. It made me laugh.”

Djalili's new stand-up tour, which comes to the Glasgow International Comedy Festival next month, doesn’t sound too earnest. “Schmuck For A Night,” is how he describes it, after the Robert De Niro character Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy, who does a stand-up set in which he says: “It’s better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime.”

Djalili has decided to reverse the scenario. “So, I am king for a lifetime and I’m going to be schmuck for a night. It’s just to say basically – come and laugh at me for 90 minutes because I’m someone who is supposedly more sorted in my life. I’ve become a king for a lifetime, but I’ll be schmuck for a night.”

But, of course, being a schmuck isn’t really the show's main topic. “I’ve been so horrified by the state of the world right now and what people are doing in the name of religion," says the 50-year-old, adding that his show will tackle big issues. "I will be dealing with questions like, who are Isis, what do they want and who’s funding them? Is Isis a death cult? Are they just people who are mentally ill? Are they people who just love drama? Or are there some people who just want to get laid?”

We all, he believes, need to try in our own ways to help solve this problem. “What I’m trying to do through comedy is to be a solution," he says. "I’m trying to do something because the world is so crazy. I’m going on tour just to try to make sense of it myself and to see if I can ask the right questions and provide the right answers.”

The idea came out of a conversation he had following the Paris attacks, with a Muslim leader who said that Muslims are failing their communities. “He confided that he had known one of the Paris attackers," says Djalili. "He thought he had been in his community and he had known him as a child. He said that Muslims are not very good at dealing with delinquency in their own communities, and this child had been a delinquent and no-one knew what to do with him. It was not dealt with. And they had a chance to deal with it. That’s what made me think, my goodness. He’s taking responsibility. He’s trying very hard to stop that from happening. You always stop things at grassroots.”

In his bid to find answers, he has spent recent months researching, attending UN meetings, talking to other comedians (such as Jon Stewart from The Daily Show) and speaking with people who are also “trying to find those answers”.

Djalili was born in the UK to Iranian parents who had moved to London prior to the Islamic revolution then found that they could not go back as their faith was persecuted. They were Baha'i, a religion that preaches the spiritual unity of all mankind and sees Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and Krishna as some among many divine messengers. Djalili continues to follow the faith and has never been back to Iran since he was a young child as he fears he could be arrested and imprisoned. He frequently campaigns for those persecuted there, including seven religious leaders who were arrested and jailed in 2008.

As Iranian, but not Muslim, Djalili has described himself as a “minority within a minority within a minority”. His parents made a living by running an anarchic guest house for Iranians coming over for medical treatment. When he arrived at nursery school, he could speak no English and was so terrified and upset he vomited, and had to be sent home. His mother was told to bring him back when he had learned English – which he did by watching television programmes such as Play School.

One of the funniest stories from his autobiography, Hopeful, is of a childhood visit to the Iranian capital of Tehran, when he nearly drowned in excrement. After falling into a garden cesspit, Djalili, then aged six, called for help to his brother, who peered down"with an expression of incredulity and disgust". Djalili managed to doggy-paddle to the other side of the pit, and put his arm out to his brother, "who was still staring at me with a frozen expression of outrage and his face that said, ‘Who are you, I don’t know you’." Thankfully, his brother then pulled him out.

One thing that is striking on reading Hopeful is the blundering, non-conscious way, Djalili seems to have got through his teenage years, endlessly failing and retaking exams and only obtaining a smattering of Es in his A Levels, then lying about his grades to get into university. Surely he’s hamming all this up? “No,” he says. “That’s genuinely how I was. I’m not bragging. I was bumbling. Genuinely. I think I’m more conscious of it now, because I looked back and I thought, my goodness I was so unaware. I genuinely was that unconscious."

Djalili's whole stand-up career has spanned a period of sensitivity over the Middle East, Islamic extremism, immigration, multiculturalism and terrorism but, he says, the climate has got worse in recent years. “I know I used to say, 'Let’s make fun of the terrorists because it takes the fear away a little bit in society.' But things have changed. Anything could happen at any moment. The world has been destabilised.”

Often, he says, other comedians complain that he manages to get away with gags on these topics that they could not.

“I’ve always felt, and I think I’ve been pigeonholed by the media, as being a very separate voice to the rest of comedy,” says Djalili. He makes an analogy with the position of Irish comedians during the Troubles: “When Britain was at war with the IRA in the 1980s, the BBC and ITV paraded Irish comedians like Jimmy Cricket, Frank Carson. It was almost as if to say that these are Irish comedians who belong to us. They’re funny to us.”

“My position," he considers, "is similar. Britain and America are always kind of at war with the Middle East in some way. And you’ve got Omid Djalili who is clearly an Iranian and very proud of his heritage, yet he is a very unique voice. He kind of belongs to Britain because he had a BBC show, but at the same time he hasn’t rejected his Middle Eastern roots. It’s a unique position and a very sensitive one. Because you don’t want to upset 'your people' and you want to remain authentic to who you are.”

Have the rules for comedians changed, in the post-Charlie Hebdo climate of sensitivity and political correctness? “There are no hard and fast rules," he says. "Where I find it very difficult to get comedy from and where I naturally don’t go is human suffering. Paedophile jokes, rape jokes, jokes about people who have suffered. I remember after 9/11 there were even jokes about people who were burning in the Twin Towers. I’ve heard audiences laugh at those jokes and I’ve just personally said – wow, people will laugh at that?”

That said, he has made jokes that he feels have been beyond the edge of political correctness. “One of the jokes I had was, ‘They’ve linked Alzheimer’s disease with people who develop in old age an inappropriate sense of humour. By the way that’s a joke done by a [he lists a series of derogatory stereotypes], and if you’re offended by that I don’t even know what I’ve just said.’”

Djalili is continually teetering between self-mockery and grandiose vision. Indeed he seems to take seriously the art of not taking himself too seriously. His work has always been diverse, ranging from playing a Bond villain in The World Is Not Enough and the slave trader in Gladiator, to stand-up comedy. But recently, it has become ridiculously so. In 2013, there was reality diving show, Splash, in which he stood grandiosely on the high board then tipped off into a clunky swan dive. Then, in 2014 there was his autobiography, Hopeful. And last year, there was We Are Many, his much-lauded documentary about the 2003 Iraq war protests, which Empire Magazine's Simon Crook described a “a work of beautiful rage”.

To the mix can be added appearances on Celebrity Squares and Loose Women, some voice work as the crazed baddie Trumper in Shaun The Sheep, a role as a dodgy strip club owner in the new Sky TV series Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, and another in Dickensian, which provoked a Telegraph TV reviewer to write: “Omid Djalili’s taxidermist Mr Venus fills every fleeting appearance with delight.”

“I think what I'm trying to say through this range of things, possibly, is you can’t keep me down," he says. "I’m not one thing. Also each project says a big thing about who I am.”

The project closest to his heart appears to be We Are Many. Nine years in the making, the film was a labour of love by director Amir Amirani, a former school friend of Djalili from Holland Park School (the state comprehensive sometimes known as "the socialist Eton"). It is, the comedian believes, “the most relevant documentary made in Britain for the last few years”.

“We Are Many is life-changing," he continues. "All of us involved with it are tremendously proud of it. It got a raft of five-star reviews, and once you’ve got that you don’t even care about Oscars or Baftas.” The documentary is, he says, about “the power of the human being, the power of our collective oneness”.

“It’s a highly political film because it says that everybody should be politicised and if we move in unison we have more power than we think and it is the power of people."

The story the film tells is of how 30 million people marching failed to stop that war, but how years later the knowledge of it was an element in stopping the Westminster government voting for intervention in Syria in 2013 – though last year, of course, that legacy seemed to have been forgotten in another vote.

The film's message, Djalili believes, is that “you need anger and hope: anger at injustice and hope that you can change things”.

He insists he is not party-political. His Baha'i faith, he says, is about unity and oneness, and forbids joining any one party, “since once you’ve joined one you have to be against another”. "But I am politicised in the sense that I will always have a discourse on all the issues of the day,” he adds.

Djalili seems in a good phase of his life. Following a "series of epiphanies" around the age of 47, he has been living "consciously". Schmuck For A Night is his way of saying, “I’ve arrived”, and that he is “consciously” being the fool. “You know, the fool is a very interesting symbol we have in life. You see the symbol of a fool or a joker, they’ve often got a picture where they’re winking with a finger on their nose. Are they foolish? Or are they a portal to knowledge? Do they have, through the powerful medium of comedy, the secrets of the universe?”

Now he says he tends only to deliver a joke if he is aware of why he is doing it. “That consciousness has made me more aware of what I’m doing and so the show is funnier and the messages are more cloaked. But if you’re a comedian and you’re unconscious you’ll be funny and then you’ll kind of laugh and put your fist up in the air. You'll say something like, 'Thatcher has to be stopped, yeah!' That’s not comedy, it's pithy statements."

So does he, in keeping with the title of his autobiography, remain hopeful? He has three children who are growing into adulthood, two already at university, in this destabilised world: does he have hope for that generation? “I do feel hopeful for them, only because of the way they’re turning out and the activities they’re involved with, which are very grassroots. They seem to be very much involved in their own communities. They’re aware of what the world is. And they’re so much more advanced and conscious than I was. Even my 16-year-old is conscious. He has achieved a consciousness that I hadn’t even achieved when I was 30.”

Omid Djalili: Live 2016 is at Glasgow International Comedy Festival on March 19 at 7pm. The Sunday Herald is the festival's media partner. For programme information and tickets, visit www.glasgowcomedyfestival.com