Omid Djalili: Everybody's fool

It's a tough job being a joker who has to represent practically all ethnic minorities, but Omid Djalili is doing his best. Mike Higgins talks to the British-Iranian comic about his stand-up routine, his film roles and those Danish cartoons...

This, to put it mildly, is an optimistic comment for a British comic of Middle-Eastern extraction. The distinctly unamusing effect of one Danish newspaper cartoon surely illustrates that. But let's cut Djalili some slack. If you don't know him from his stand-up, you probably saw him having his testicles assaulted by Oliver Reed in the film Gladiator or perhaps over Christmas in the TV adaptation of My Family and Other Animals. Either way, there are few public figures in the UK both as popular and as well positioned as Djalili to find the common ground between the West and the Middle East (and to crack a few gags about it once he gets there).

Djalili was born to Iranian parents and raised in central London, and has only visited Iran once, with his family, when he was six. Nevertheless, for the past decade his stand-up comedy has dealt with the experience of being a British Persian; of growing up, as he puts it, "between Ayatollah Khomeini and Dickie Davis". The titles of his tours speak for themselves: A Short, Fat Kebab-Shop Owner's Son, The Arab and The Jew, Omid Djalili is Ethnic. By his own admission, his mid-Nineties stand-up wasn't particularly polished: "A couple of slides, a bit of bongos and some dancing." With his gift for physical comedy and vocal mimicry, though, he developed his act, picking up several awards including a 2002 Perrier nomination, and a large following around the country.

But 9/11 and the tumultuous events that followed cast Djalili's mixed cultural heritage in a new light. He responded to the deterioration of the relationships between West and Middle East with typically robust material, about, for instance, suicide bombings. His current tour, No Agenda, was conceived with something quite different in mind, though. It finishes in March with two dates at the London Palladium, but it began last summer, in the chaotic days following the 7/7 bombings in London.

"I came up with the idea in April 2005, basically with me having had enough of having to deal with 9/11," says Djalili. "I wanted to talk about other things. Then 7 July happened. It totally reshaped the material - I revisited those same ethnic issues but in a deeper and more relevant way."

In No Agenda, he opens his show with an old joke of his, but one that still teases our preconceptions: for a few minutes, he speaks in a thick, Middle Eastern accent, before switching to the Kensington drawl that better reflects his upbringing. There's plenty of broad physical messing about, such as his skit on Iranian disco-dancing and his mother's wailing over-reaction to a hot summer's day. It's broad, hyper, funny stuff, and not just about the problems of multi-culturalism but also of class. But then, in passages that are more wry than laugh-out-loud funny, he ponders why even he is alarmed by the sight of Arabs in airports or why the 7 July London bombers targeted Edgware Road, a site, he says, up there with Mecca, Medina and Damascus in terms of Islamic importance. Occasionally he looks slightly uncertain of his material, which, given the times, is understandable.

Because Djalili must be careful. Across the Middle East and Europe, the publication of a Danish cartoonist's satirical depiction of the Prophet Mohamed has provoked violent demonstrations and a furious, spittle-flecked debate over freedom of speech and its political and religious implications. The wrong gag could land the comedian in a lot of trouble. Does this worry him? "I worry all the time. I feel nervous about my own material. I try things out in comedy clubs first of all - I had a joke about how every culture has something they're embarrassed about and can't explain - in Britain you've got Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, in the Middle East you've got suicide bombers. Frankly between a Laurence Llewelyn Bowen makeover and a suicide bomber, Bowen leaves a lot more mess. A comedy club audience might laugh at that, but I tried it in the theatres and it didn't get a laugh."

So out the gag went - and, despite the fact that he himself hasn't seen the Danish cartoon, he believes the European magazines and newspapers who published it should have shown similar discretion. "I don't see the point in representing Mohamed as a terrorist. To me, that can only say Islam is an awful religion and all Muslims are terrorists. What else I can infer from that? Unless it's a brilliant gag ... Whoever did that in Denmark showed a huge insensitivity and lack of understanding.

"I believe in free speech, but you do need to censor yourself. There's a difference between mouthing off and saying something for the common good," insists Djalili. "It's interesting to me that the Iranians are doing Holocaust cartoons now. Part of me thinks, what nutcases; another part of me thinks, what is the line of acceptability here?" Most of which puts him in stark opposition to the many comedians who campaigned, successfully in the event, against the recent Religious Hatred Bill. "My views are very conservative on that. A big part of me wanted that Bill to go through. I happen to think British people are very sensitive, but I think [we need] to protect ourselves - otherwise people will die. For people like Rowan Atkinson to say we have to have freedom of speech, fine - but what about the nutters who will say anything?"

It's certainly not a fashionable view in the stand-up community. "Yes, they think I'm very strange. I've tried to impress that there are sensitivities. I really find it unacceptable that some comedians revel in the fact that 'I had a couple of walkouts today'."

These views have not dented Djalili's widespread appeal. One striking aspect of his gigs is the racial diversity of the audience. Where most comedians wonder aloud if there are any Scousers or Welsh in tonight, Djalili asks Iranians, Indians, even Jews to make themselves known, and they do. Many, it seems, feel represented by Djalili, who was raised in Kensington and now lives in East Sheen. It's something which Djalili admits not feeling entirely comfortable with, and a routine in No Agenda reflects his unease - after 9/11 there was sense of solidarity among ethnic minorities but, Djalili wonders, where should we draw the line: at the Turkish? The Irish? No, he decides: at the Chinese. So does he chafe at being cast as the Everyman of ethnic minority comedy? "You feel good in the sense that your act is universal - but I can't be representative of every single religious minority, because that's dangerous - if you're not representative you can say something that pisses them off."

What's more, it's probable that many of his British audience assume that Djalili is Muslim. He isn't; he's Ba'hai, a fact which, he says, he has tried and failed to communicate to audiences in the past. "People assume I'm Muslim, which I have no problem with. I know a lot of Muslims get turned off by the fact that I'm not a Muslim, but I'm not trying to represent the Muslim faith. I defend Islam because I feel there's a lot of Islamophobia in the world right now."

And while he's happy to present himself as "an ambassador of the Middle East", sometimes Djalili just can't keep up with events. He says he's developing a routine about the Danish cartoons. And while he cracked one joke about Iran's nuclear programme - about how Iranians will travel wherever there's chicken and uranium - Djalili confesses with a smile that, on the night I saw him in Cambridge, he simply forgot a longer routine about why Iran shouldn't have the bomb.

If Djalili is feeling the pressure of his unique position, he doesn't show it, putting his case across freely and peppered with plenty of easygoing jokes. By contrast, the subject that seems to trouble him in our conversation is the axing of a sitcom he appeared in three years ago with Whoopi Goldberg in the US, Whoopi. The sitcom, he assures me, was a ratings success in the US, and its demise followed a previous piece of bad luck for Djalili in the US - in 2002 NBC pulled a show it had offered Djalili because US troops were going into the Middle East. (It was thought that Americans would balk at the prospect of being entertained by an Arab-looking comedian.) But, he proudly tells me, he is only the second British comedian, after Eddie Izzard, to have been awarded a comedy special by another American network, the cable channel HBO.

Make no mistake, Djalili is ambitious. He is happy to admit that when both the BBC and NBC came calling in 2002, he took the big money that the US network was offering: "The opportunities are huge out there, but I've always been irked that things happen for me in America before they happen here." That said, he will soon be doing a pilot for the BBC, a sketch and stand-up show. Still, while he says that he agrees with his family's desire to stay in the UK, you feel he'd love to be pushing his career forward full-time in the US.

He also feels that he had much to offer the US by his simply appearing on Whoopi as an amusing Middle Eastern handyman: "America was so xenophobic. There was me taking on America, and, though I didn't single-handedly change perceptions, from all the reviews everyone says I was the funniest character in the show." If that sounds a bit gauche, he is, sometimes. But it's working. His feature-film parts are improving - from having to flesh out stock swarthy types in films such as Gladiator and The Mummy, Djalili is getting bigger, more complex roles. He's soon to appear as, for instance, Heath Ledger's assistant in the forthcoming Casanova and in a leading role as a New York Jew in a yet-to-be-announced production.

Djalili clearly thrives on being a poster boy for what you might call Western-Arab integration. He tells me excitedly about how he played an Asian tsunami benefit gig last year in Qatar before the Emir, Bill Clinton and Pele, among others, where he was the star turn. But he will have to be wary. Djalili knows exactly how closely watched he'll be as a British-Iranian comic striving for success around the world, and particularly in the US. A misjudged line about Middle Eastern secret service violence in Whoopi earned him ferocious criticism on a host of Iranian websites, a slip-up which, though he didn't write the line, he acknowledges as his fault.

For Djalili, though, concerns such as these are "details". "There's no other guy from my background who has filled those sizes of theatres. The most significant thing from an ethnic point of view is being a foreigner moving into the mainstream - that's the whole point, I think." Let's hope it's that simple.

'No Agenda', various venues until 26 March (www.omid-djalili.com). 'Casanova' is out on Friday