Kumail Nanjiani’s Night Thoughts: simply a great hour of comedy
The actor returns to standup in a special filled with the kind of psychological insights that emerge when you spend a decade in the public eye
I have a complicated relationship with Kumail Nanjiani’s work. He’s a phenomenally talented writer, comedian and actor, but to warmly embrace all of his projects is to look past some problematic details.
Nanjiani was wonderful in the HBO tech bro satire Silicon Valley, but the show resorted to orientalist tropes by casting him as the stereotypical desexualised Asian man. He was nominated for an Oscar for the beautifully romantic The Big Sick, based on his real-life love story with Emily V Gordon, but the film also promoted shockingly racist portrayals of Muslim women with all the women his parents set him up with being two-dimensional objects of ridicule (Don’t get me started on how the only charming Pakistani woman is played by a Black actress).
Yes, it is extremely cool that he got hench, he set a precedent of creating proper boundaries around how much he was willing to discuss his body. And like most people with a modicum of taste, I hated Marvel’s Eternals, but I could see that his performance as superpowered Bollywood actor Kingo was by far the best thing in that movie.
Watching his delightful new standup comedy special Night Thoughts, streaming on Disney+ from 19 December, I found that I wasn’t alone in my mixed feelings towards his work. No one has a more complicated relationship with the work of Kumail Nanjiani than Nanjiani himself.
The Pakistani-American comedian has been away from standup for more than a decade. Since his last comedy special Beta Male in 2013, he’s undergone the kind of Hollywood metamorphosis usually reserved for Marvel origin stories. (Though he sadly now has that notorious flop on his CV.)
Nanjiani graduated from cult-comedy character actor to a fully fledged leading man, popping up everywhere from Only Murders in the Building to Oh, Mary! and the Ghostbusters reboot they won’t stop making — all in an industry that often doesn’t serve well those who look or sound like him.
Given all that, Nanjiani could have breezed into a new hour of easygoing standup. But Night Thoughts digs much deeper: it’s a slow, careful unearthing of the psychological insights that emerge when you spend 10 years in the public eye. It’s not the glossy “celebrity tells all” version; it’s the genuinely queasy stuff. The stuff you only confess in the dark.
One of the longest parts in the special is about a recent miserable press cycle. The media machine moves on so quickly that we barely had time to digest how wild it is that Eternals sucked. That same year, in 2021, its director Chloé Zhao had become the first woman of colour to win a best picture Oscar for Nomadland. Nanjiani was hot off The Big Sick. It was meant to be Angelina Jolie’s big comeback. But Eternals bombed at the box office and became the first Marvel film to ever be rated “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes.
“Bad Reviews Land Nanjiani Into Therapy,” he says in Night Thoughts, quoting headlines back in Chicago where he came up as a comedian. The audience whoops, as all good audiences do, and he visibly recoils before launching into his experience of a high-profile failure that he doesn’t even have to name: “Not great that so many people know exactly what movie I’m talking about.” It’s the kind of honesty people in the public eye love to humbly pretend they’re offering, but almost never are.
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What’s striking is not just how he bounced back from that disappointment, it’s how he manages to make his irritation feel genuinely relatable. He’s not asking us to weep for Hollywood’s elite — both Nanjiani and Jolie are doing fine and part of his appeal is knowing how lucky he is. “However, that does not mean bad shit doesn’t happen to me. I have disappointments. I have fears,” he says. For a moment Night Thoughts teeters on the edge of self-pity, but then he catches himself. Nanjiani’s eyes flick upward, mischief returning. “My baby cat gets sick… Sometimes my abs get stuck in my belt.”
Throughout Night Thoughts, Nanjiani performs an exquisite balancing act: indulging in the very human pleasure of feeling a bit hard done by, without ever losing the earnest core of what he’s trying to say. He wants to be understood properly, not in the way a viral quote-tweet understands you or a podcast clip can be circulated out of context.
Nanjiani is willing to slice himself open to share something honest with his audience. That rarest of celebrity feats: being both self-aware and sincerely felt. For once it was nice to sit back and have an uncomplicated relationship with him. This is simply a great hour of comedy.
Night Thoughts is streaming on Disney+ in the UK and Ireland from 19 December
