The man billed at the funniest Iranian, Omid Djalili, hopes to make it second time lucky for York's Comedy Festival having been forced out last year by illness. He talks to Steve Pratt about being a rare Arab face on US TV.

EVEN if he's ill, comedian Omid Djalili can usually muster up enough strength to get on stage and perform. So he must have been really sick to have missed the first show in last year's York Comedy Festival. Hopefully, he'll be fit enough to perform this year.

"I'd been travelling backwards and forwards from Los Angeles and picked up a very bad bug on the plane," he explains.

"Usually if I'm not well I can drive up and do the show. But I was so ill before the York date. It was the start of a whole lot of illnesses I had. I only really conquered them two months ago."

Djalili's heavy work schedule might have contributed to his poor health as he'd been working non-stop for some time doing stand-up, films including The Mummy and The Calcium Kid, and a US sitcom with Whoopi Goldberg.

"It was two years of doing every possible project I was given," he says. "It was a real purple patch, from great venues to films and the TV series with Whoopi. It's stuff to which you really can't say no. Now, when I see pictures of me at the time, I realise how ill I look even with make-up.

"I'm taking a bit of a break from film and television now because a, I'm tired and b, can only focus on one thing at a time."

The man billed as "the world's funniest Iranian stand-up comedian and actor" comes to York with on the final lap of his Behind Enemy Lines show. His aim is to "put it to bed" but doubts that the continuing situation in Iraq, which gets more than a mention in his act, means that might not be possible.

He's been doing this particular show since the 2002 Edinburgh Festival, although both content and structure have changed over the years, allowing him to adapt and improvise depending on events of the day. "It's a show that won't go away," he says. That's mainly because he felt such a show was needed in the post 9/11 climate. "It was almost issuing a statement and I felt this was my response," he says. "No one had dealt with it in any real in-depth way. When I went to Edinburgh, no one had tackled the subject, but were using images of 9/11 to promote shows. That made me more determined."

He went Behind Enemy Lines in New York in March, making himself the first Middle Eastern person to get up and speak on the subject. Six months earlier would have been too soon to do such a thing, he feels, as New York "was still very raw".

He emphasises that by doing comedy around the topic, he's not making light of such serious matters, but feels it's good to talk about such things. "People trust me because I speak about it so personally and deal with it in a very humane way, not a political way. I try to treat it from a humanitarian view," says Djalili.

"I would never take a stance or a side. It's far too complicated. By talking about it, I hope people will see some of the reasons behind what's happening." Awaiting release is a film he made, Deadlines, which deals with journalists in wartime and how they become part of the problem.

He thinks people want to talk about such matters. "There was a very 1980s way of dealing with things and that was by lecturing. I see some younger

comedians who say they're going to make a statement like 'Bush go because he's evil' and put their hand in a fist, expecting people to applaud," he says.

"Audiences are far less tolerant about those type of performers. You have to have some kind of perspective. Audiences are far too sophisticated to accept them."

The Whoopi sitcom, for one of the major US TV networks, arose out of a deal he had with NBC through his stand-up performances. He was going to appear in his own sitcom, until the war in Iraq led executives to believe that having a Middle Eastern person fronting their own show wouldn't be accepted by viewers.

In Whoopi, he played the Iranian doorman at a hotel run by Goldberg's one hit wonder diva. He thought it significant as there were no other people from the Middle East in principal roles on TV. Faced with doing his own thing or the sitcom with a potential audience of 100 million people, he opted for the latter.

"I had lots of chats with Whoopi beforehand to see if we got along, not just politically but comedically," he says. "The show was very controversial, outwardly anti-establishment. It was blatantly anti-Bush and anti-war, and talking about current affairs every week. The ratings weren't bad but it was dismissed as ratings failure when it was not."

Predictably perhaps, given the nature of American politics, the series was cancelled after 22 episodes. By this point in the interview Djalili is getting worried. "This is terrible. I sound very serious. But when you see my act, it's different."

* Omid Djalili appears at York Grand Opera House on Saturday at 8pm. Tickets 0870 6063595.

Published: 03/06/2004