‘I was too scared to admit it hurt my feelings’: Kumail Nanjiani returns to stand-up after 12 years

You ever get night thoughts? That’s what Kumail Nanjiani calls them. They’re the kind of thoughts that keep you up at night – half-baked, often brought on by stress, and usually best forgotten by morning.

But one thought kept sticking. After more than a decade away, it was time for him to return to stand-up comedy – and to do it more honestly and with more vulnerability than ever before.

Still, the prospect was terrifying. “For a while I was like, maybe I can't do it again. Maybe I don't have it any more,” Nanjiani tells The National. The problems were twofold. For one, he hadn’t released a stand-up special since 2013’s Beta Male, and had forgotten how to even do it.

“Writing stand-up is a particular thing – it’s different from writing movies or television. Relearning how to do it was very hard. I’d lost my confidence,” he continues.

In that time, the Pakistani-American comedian’s life and career transformed. After the breakout success of HBO’s Silicon Valley in 2014, his time was focused on film and television, and his trajectory seemed stratospheric.

Nanjiani has sustained a successful acting career and appeared in this year's 'Ella McCay'. Photo: Disney

In 2018, he and his wife Emily V Gordon were nominated for an Academy Award for their film The Big Sick, based on their real-life experiences with cancer and cross-cultural marriage. From there, he became a leading man – starring in the successful Stuber opposite Dave Bautista, and even transforming into a Marvel superhero for 2021’s Eternals. From there, he and Emily created the acclaimed Little America for Apple TV+.

But could he still do comedy? He wasn't yet sure. “It took a while to get there. I knew my goal – I wanted to be as personal and vulnerable as I could possibly be. But it wasn’t until a few months of doing it again that I had my first joke that I thought might be good,” he says.

“I thought – OK, I know this is funny, and this is about as well as I can do. If I can do this one joke, I can do the rest. That’s when I started getting up the confidence again to do another hour of stand-up.”

The joke was pulled from real life and was about a group of people swimming in his pool after breaking into his house. And it was funny, but it wasn’t vulnerable. Total honesty still eluded him.

In part, that’s because he was still working through the pain. As his career flourished, he became a laughing stock in certain circles – with many mocking him for his dramatic body transf