Nadia Manzoor’s one-woman comedy show explores the cultural contradictions of growing up as British-Pakistani Muslim

As starting points for a one-woman comedy show go, family estrangement and religious tradition rarely have the audience rolling in the aisles. But when Burq Off!, Nadia Manzoor’s humorous autobiographical ramble through her life as a British-Pakistani Muslim living in London, begins its run in the UK capital today, it will do so on the back of some impressive reviews. The Economist called it “terrific”, and with CNN and the BBC both featuring Manzoor’s show, there’s a real sense she has touched a nerve.

“Incredible, really,” says Manzoor from Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. “When I first wrote the material it was purely for my own catharsis. I wasn’t talking to my dad or my brother. My mother had passed away. There was certainly no humour – it was more like a heavy, dark, cultural memoir.”

But Manzoor says she has always enjoyed performing and, after working with a New York improv group, she realised comedy could actually make her story more powerful. So, in Burq Off! she plays 21 characters – most of whom are her family – in a coming-of-age drama that starts when Manzoor is 5 and ends when she is 20. Along the way, she adeptly picks apart a childhood full of contradiction and frustration.

“Really, it’s a journey through my life as I battle with the blindly accepted traditions I had to grow up with as a Pakistani growing up in England. What I like to do is point out the ridiculousness in some of them – like my grandma telling me that if I spilt salt on the floor, I would have to pick it up with my eyelashes in hell. I mean, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

Original article by Ben East

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Nadia Manzoor’s one-woman comedy show explores the cultural contradictions of growing up as British-Pakistani Muslim