Paul Chowdhry: ‘People write this abuse to me, and I’ve just got to take it?’

We are surveying, from the terrace, Paul Chowdhry’s garden, which is quite large (for London) and very neat. He has, he confesses, a man who comes to help him keep on top of it. That’s posh, I say. Having considered himself working-class all his life, Chowdhry is now considering whether he’s middle-class. He does have hummus in the kitchen, I point out. “And it’s organic,” he says, deadpan.

You may know Chowdhry from television, but possibly not. He doesn’t have a huge TV profile – he’s never done Mock the Week; he’s only done two editions of Live at the Apollo. Bookers rarely ask him on their panel shows (just one episode of 8 out of 10 Cats). He hosted the final series of Channel 4’s Stand Up for the Week, but his audience – one of the most diverse audiences of any current standup – has been largely built through word of mouth and social media, particularly the videos he makes and posts. He has done two sold-out tours, What’s Happening White People? in 2012, and 2015’s PC’s World, both of which were filmed for DVD. His new tour, which takes in Edinburgh, is about to start and he has had to add dates to cope with the demand. It includes two dates at Wembley Arena.

There have been attempts to pigeonhole Chowdhry throughout his career but they have never really succeeded. He is nearly 43 but could pass for a twentysomething. Early on, he was considered by TV commissioning editors as an “Asian comic”, and put on comedy shows with other comics of Asian heritage. It’s true that he does lots of niche jokes about Gujuratis, and uses a liberal sprinkling of Punjabi swearwords, but he rejects being described as an Asian comic. His stage presence can be abrasive, controlling, self-assured; in person he seems gentle and unassuming. He says he is left-leaning, and his act punctures bigotry, but some of his jokes can also have shades of misogyny and homophobia. Later in our conversation, the subject of London Underground’s decision to stop using “ladies and gentlemen” in favour of non-binary language comes up and he sounds aghast (I think – it can be hard to tell with his straight-faced delivery). “Where do you stop?” he says, then softens. “Maybe I’ll do that one day, not be labelled as something.”

The show, Live Innit, covers, just for starters: class, prejudice, the way Brexit is changing the country, loss, dating in the age of Tinder, and being mistaken for a terrorist. One of its big themes, he says, is mental health and the difference between sadness and depression. Has he had depression? “Well, I haven’t been on antidepressants, but I’ve thought I’ve been depressed. Mental health is such a complex issue, and it’s hard to find out when you’re sad and when you’re depressed. Sadness is a natural human emotion. People say ‘depressed’ and you’re taking away from the people who are really depressed. I’ve known friends who have gone to the doctors’ and said: ‘I’m really sad about a breakup,’ and they’ve been given antidepressants.”

He started going to mental health groups and talks on depression. “People who help you break through, mental blockages [you may have] – find out where they come from. Having a balance in your mind. Before, I’d be either really happy or really down in the dumps, and now it’s [about] trying to surf across the middle and keeping it balanced. It wasn’t really therapy because it was a massive group of people, seminars and talks and stuff. I’ve never really sat down with a therapist.”

Chowdhry’s mother died when he was five. He talks about this in his new show, the first time he has felt able to do so publicly. “You don’t quite understand it when you’re five,” he says. “The only things you see are superheroes who have lost a parent and become a superhero. But that doesn’t help a child. When you’re five, you don’t get it – you think they’ll come back.” He doesn’t want to give away the punchline – there is one, of course – and it won’t be a sombre show. “You don’t want to have people come to the shows and be crying.” He laughs. “Imagine doing that for 100 shows! I’d have a breakdown by the end of it. The reason I talk about it is, if people have gone through these things … I’m not sure if it will help them, but it’s a way to try and balance it in their own mind.”

It is his most personal set since 2007’s Lost in Confusion. In that, he spoke a lot about his experience of growing up in the 70s and 80s, and the racism he and his family endured. He was beaten up by skinheads as a teenager. When he was 13, his father was coming home from a night out with his brothers when they were attacked by a gang; Chowdhry’s dad was stabbed in the face and had to have 50 stitches. Chowdhry remembers him coming home from hospital in the morning. “He just got on with his day,” he remembers. The police didn’t do anything.

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Now he gets it online all the time. It started around 2014 when his profile began to increase. “People would write this abuse to me, and I’ve just got to take it?” he says. “I thought, you know what, I should turn this on its head. I’d basically treat them like a heckler.” He likes to film their Facebook profiles with a running commentary, and upload the videos on to Facebook, where they get millions of views. In 2003, he was attacked backstage by someone who had been heckling him during a gig. He has had death threats. He took one to the police, who failed to do much about it; a few months later, they told him they were letting it drop. “I said, ‘What do I do if he turns up?’ ‘Well, call us if he turns up.’” He gives a grim laugh. “‘It might be a bit late then.’”

In the past couple of weeks, commentators and comedians have been talking about the comic Daniel Kitson’s show, in which he says the word “Paki” several times. The debate hinges on whether it is acceptable for a white comedian (in front of a largely white, although almost certainly liberal, audience) to use such a toxic word so casually, even to prove a point about racism, when he – and they – can have no real grasp of its effect. Chowdhry hasn’t seen Kitson’s show. “I’d have to see it to know how he said the joke,” he says. “I’m not one to say we can ban words, or say: ‘I can say this word because I’m Asian.’ Does he have the right to use it? If it’s in context and it’s a powerful routine … Louis CK uses the N-word a lot in his act.” But, he adds: “The word does make you wince, it does make your stomach churn. It was a normal word [in the past] and we had to laugh along with it. I kind of don’t want to hear it any more.” Other comics have said it to him backstage at gigs “in an ironic way, as they see it. But I don’t read it that way.” At least, he says, it has made people talk about it. “Would you say that in front of a black comic? It’s almost as if Asian people are [supposed to be] submissive: ‘Yeah, it’s funny, don’t worry about it.’”

Chowdhry grew up in Edgware (his father had come to the UK from India in 1964, and worked as a bus conductor before buying a newsagent’s and sandwich shop). He realised at school that he was funny and interested in comedy, but was too scared as a teenager, having grown up largely on a comedy diet of Bernard Manning, to go to a comedy club. “I watched [Manning] on videos and he’d pick out the ‘ethnic’ [in the audience] and rip them apart. That looked like my worst nightmare.” Later, he got hold of cassettes of American comics such as Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, and started seeking out others. He dropped out of a computer science degree, took a course in film and TV, and started working as an extra – getting jobs on Holby City and in the film Rogue Trader – while building up his comedy skills at open-mic nights. Within a couple of years, he was appearing at the Comedy Store and Jongleurs. He loved, he says, “the instant hit of an audience, that instant reaction you get. I love doing the online videos and that’s probably as close as you can get [when not playing live] to being on stage and in front of a room full of strangers.”

Some of Chowdhry’s best moments come when he’s playing with what is and isn’t acceptable, particularly for the well-meaning, politically correct white people in the audience. “I thought Dave was about to leave,” he says, using his name for a generic white man. Then he puts on “Dave’s” cockney accent: “Nah, I can’t take this bollocks, I don’t know if I should or shouldn’t laugh at this shit.”

Intent is key, he says. “When I [was on the circuit], comics would say: ‘I’m not going to do that joke about disabled people because there’s a disabled person in the front row,’ and I’d go: ‘Well, then it’s offensive. If you can’t do it in front of them, you shouldn’t be doing the joke, mate.’” He has a talent for accents – he will do people from different regions of India, Nigerians, and so on. “I’m not doing a Jim Davidson Chalky act,” he says, referring to the deeply unpleasant comedian whose West Indian character, Chalky White, was a crude racist stereotype. Chowdhry says he has “lived amongst people like this”, meaning people of different ethnicities, “and a lot of the material was written by talking to them. If a white comic did an Indian accent, would it work in front of an Indian audience? I think it could. A lot of it is intent.”

Chowdhry’s impression of working-class Dave is another thing he will try to unpick in his new show, he says. “A guy comes up to me and goes [he puts on his cockney accent]: ‘How come you can do my accent and I’m not allowed to do a ‘bud bud ding ding’ accent?’” But it’s about so much more than race – class, equality, punching up or down. Nobody ever criticises him for doing a posh white guy. “But how come no one’s ever had a go at me for doing Dave? No one’s ever said: ‘Paul Chowdhry does a cockney accent and I was offended,’” says the man with a voice, a following, a nearly sold-out tour, and a gardener. “People could argue that was punching down.”

Paul Chowdhry tours the UK with his new show, Live Innit, from 1 September