Brighton - Stand-up Daliso Chaponda on a world where the headlines "mock themselves"
Stand-up comedian Daliso Chaponda admits he has started to find the headlines so absurd, so chaotic and so overwhelming that they seem to be mocking themselves.
Where do we go from here, he has found himself wondering.
The answer, for Daliso at least, is his brand-new show Topical Storm, touring to 40 venues across the UK, with venues including Brighton Komedia on Tuesday, April 28; and The Arc, Winchester on Thursday, June 11.
“The initial thought is that I've been doing satirical comedy for 20 odd years now, maybe 15 years. When I started as a comedian, I was doing more of the relationship stuff but I quickly moved to the news stuff. But then over the last few years I have started to realise that it feels like satire is futile in a way. The way that the news is consumed is just so different. And I don't know whether it was just a longing for your youth but I remember when we used to be able to agree on facts and then you could have different opinions about the facts. But now people don't even agree on what the facts actually are.”
Daliso cites a recent tragic shooting in the States after which various different versions of the truth started to emerge...
Topical Storm explores all the issues, a show not just about the news, but about news itself. Journalists, bloggers, fake news, satirical news are all drawn in as Daliso asks whether the reporting of events has become part of the chaos rather than the cure. Are we more polarised than ever? And would we be better off going right back to the first news bulletin – a caveman scratching on a wall – and starting over?
“I know some people who the only way they know about what's happening in the world is what appears on their TikTok feed. And we get news that is actually tailored to us. I've done so much research about right wing people that my algorithm thinks that I am right wing. I'm always getting recommendations to join some Tommy Robinson thing! I’ve got a very dodgy search history but that’s just the way it works.
“The show started out from thinking about things like that, but it has evolved into different areas. A lot of the time I'm talking not just about news stories but news gathering and about fake headlines. The weird thing about reality now is that it is totally subjective for some people.
“I know someone who writes for (a national newspaper), and he doesn't even write the headlines. And he says that the headlines are always so much more salacious than the actual story.”
Daliso has had his own share of it. There was a headline about “BGT contestant’s secret strip club past” – “as if I had actually been a stripper. What it was was that I once did a gig in a strip club!
“I think there are some mainstream channels here where the bias is extreme. I talk about GB News and Fox News. It is news but there is an opinion.
“And the show has just grown. It keeps growing and growing because the world keeps feeding me! When I think that you can't get anything more bizarre or stranger than what's just happened then something more bizarre happens.”
But Daliso insists it's not a depressing show – thanks to the fact that there is comedy: “If I did a lecture on this then people would walk out but with comedy all the big ideas are hidden in the scaffolding. People might like a funny joke about Nigel Farage or about me being in the tabloids but it's what's underneath that. I swing between optimism and pessimism. AI could ruin the whole world. There are many ways in which it's ruining the world already but then I talked to my brother who is a doctor and I realised that AI is a tool and that we have to grapple with it. And then I start thinking that social media is still a very young technology and maybe the people who are young now are going to grow up using it in better ways.
“So when you're talking about things that could be real or are not real, then maybe it could be depressing but I am generally positive. It is going to be a long twilight struggle, to quote JFK but it's possible to hope. And I think that's where comedy comes in. Trump gets much more upset by people like Jimmy Kimmel making fun of him than he does by the politicians criticising him. So I do think there is still a big role for satire.”