Shappi has found that laughter really is the best medicine to help her through a painful marriage break-up.
She is, however, mindful of the son she and her soon-to-be-ex share and makes it clear she won’t use her act as a way of publicly criticizing her son’s dad. In fact, she clears here jokes with his friends, she explained to the Birmingham Post.
“I regard my husband as the father of my child, and as such I don’t want to do anything to hurt him.”
Shappi, 37, separated from fellow comedian Christian Reilly last year after five years of marriage. They are still in the process of divorcing. They have a three-year-old son, Cassius.
“The paperwork is dragging on, but I do feel better about the situation than I did,” she says.
“When we first split, I was in such pain, I couldn’t talk about anything else on stage. I was in the eye of the storm. I’m more at peace with it now and I don’t talk about it as personally as I used to. It’s not all ‘Help me, my heart has been drop-kicked into a lake of fire.’
“I am still heartbroken, but I hope I can be funnier about the divorce now. I am friends with my husband and we have a rule not to say anything in our acts that the other person isn’t happy with. We don’t want our son to grow up and see his parents slagging each other off on YouTube.
“I invited his representatives, his five best friends, to see the show and they said it was fine and not to take anything out.”
Shappi was born in Tehran but brought up in London, after her family fled the revolution. She says the family received death threats after her father, comedian Hadi Khorsandi, made jokes about the revolutionary regime.
Last week she appeared at a show in Birmingham, in the English Midlands. Talking to the Birmingham Post, she recalled an earlier visit to the city.
“I took a coach to a gig in Birmingham and a passenger was eating an apple. I had an overwhelming desire to snatch it out of his hand, and when we arrived I had to find a shop to buy one. That’s when I realized I might be pregnant.”
Now, fittingly, son Cassius speaks like a Brummie, as Birmingham residents are called in England—although she doesn’t attribute the boy’s accent to the apple incident.
“My aunt and uncle are sociology lecturers at Aston University [in Birmingham] and their five-year-old daughter Leyla, whom Cassius adores, has a Birmingham accent. “To be like her, he started speaking like a Brummie, too. It’s hilarious. The accent gets a bad press, but I like it.
“I think my favorite audiences are Midland ones. You’re not northern enough to hate southerners but not southern enough to be snobby,” she said.
Another Midland connection for Shappi is that people sometimes confuse her for Birmingham-born comedian Shazia Miraz, who was born of Pakistani parents. They have similar names and make jokes about terrorism, though Shazia is a Muslim while Shappi is not religious.
Shappi remembers: “A drunken woman came up to me once and said ‘I think it’s really out of order that you don’t wear your hejab on stage any more.’ I tried to explain that I’d never worn a hejab and she was mixing me up with Shazia. But she was having none of it.
“I was on stage once with Shazia, doing a charity performance of the Vagina Monologues. The next day on Twitter, someone said, ‘You were brilliant when you said…’ and quoted one of Shazia’s lines.
Shappi appeared in Birmingham on a double bill last week with comic Jon Richardson. “I get women buying me drinks in the hope I will introduce them to Jon. Not that I ever do. If I started matchmaking girls who fancy male comedians, I would never do anything else. Any man who ever told a joke behind a microphone gets an army of female fans. We call them gag hags.
“Women can be ferocious. I’ve been physically pushed out of the way by girls trying to talk to my husband.’’
