25.03.2010

Wiping away a tear

Charlie Pottins reviews Shappi Khorsandi's A beginner's guide to acting English London 2009, pp330' £11.99

They say your old time Yiddish music hall audience expected a laugh, a cry and a catchy song. Melodious as her giggle might be, however, Shappi Khorsandi did not give us a song when she introduced her book at London’s Stratford Circus theatre back in September. But those in the audience expecting only light-hearted laughter from the Iranian-born woman described by The Guardian as “Britain’s best young female comic” were treated to a surprise.

A beginner’s guide to acting English is much too rich to sit in a genre made familiar by writers like George Mikes or even Leo Rosten about how funny it is for foreigners to learn the vagaries of English language and culture. Much too funny and much too serious. Shappi Khorsandi does not deal in stereotypes, but draws her humour from real life, showing the funny side of her own as well as others’.

But Shappi is not afraid to talk about the less amusing side, whether it is her childhood encounters with racism and prejudice in Britain, or how as a little girl she almost got used, on lifting the phone, to hearing ferocious men threatening to kill her father. Though she introduces such serious experiences with a deceptively light touch, you can find yourself laughing, then wiping away a tear that is not laughter.

‘Baba’ (Daddy) Hadi Khorsandi was a popular Iranian satirist, and in 1979 he was overjoyed like others at the overthrow of the shah, whose regime had often censored his work. Shappi’s mother had explained to the children how the shah lived in luxury and did nothing for the poor. But then the revolution was usurped by the “men in black who never smiled”. The Khorsandis soon became not just exiles, but potential targets for the ayatollah’s death squads.

Little Shappi thought she would write to Khomeini, explain that her dad was really a nice man who made everybody laugh, and promise that if the ayatollah came to visit, her mother would make soup that he would like. She heard a worrying story about a girl being flogged for not wearing hijab, and imagined what would happen if they came to her school in Ealing and flogged her in front of the class.

So Shappi can do serious as well as funny, and knows her country is rather than just her family history. She momentarily surprised her Stratford audience with a reference to how Dr Mossadeq’s government was overthrown by MI6 and CIA machinations when it dared to nationalise Iran’s oil. Since then, two former US presidents had apologised, “but Tony Blair just asked, ‘Dr who?’”

Her sympathies in the book are for ordinary people, like those who sat in the Rex cinema, in a poor district of Abadan, munching pistachio nuts and pumpkin seeds as they watched a controversial film, and were burned to death, more than 400 of them. People thought it was the shah’s secret police who had bolted the doors and started the fire. After the revolution and a trial, they learned it was ruthless Islamists who had calculated both the death toll and the public reaction in blaming the shah. Rather than make martyrs of themselves, this brand of fanatic preferred to make martyrs of others.

I hope I have not put anyone off reading what is, after all, a humorous and heart-warming book, as you would expect from a woman who has made her breakthrough into the white, male worlds of Have I got news for you? and Live at the Apollo. It is a rich dish - nourishing with a mix of sweet comedy and seriously hot spice. And if that seems exotic, I think its subjects of family, childhood, education and exile are pretty universal.

Some books you can read and take back to the library. This is one you will want on your shelves - handy to dip into, and there to pass on to your ‘beginners’ when they are ready for it.