Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has made a career out of making people laugh.

And right now, he's doing it in two languages, English and Farsi, the mother tongue of his Iranian parents.

Omeid Jalili was born in London in the swinging 60s.

He figured out that as a slightly overweight Iranian kid,

the best way to win popularity at school was to make his peers laugh. And lucky for him, he was good at

it and he's never really stopped since. In his 20s, he tried serious acting, but his first love

and forte was comedy. He took his stand-up show to the Edinburgh

Festival and found he had a hit on his hands, and he never looked back. Much of his humor

involved playing with cultural stereotypes. His own Middle Eastern origins gave him a fresh perspective

on the way race, religion and culture played out in an increasingly diverse

United Kingdom. Politics came into it too. After 9-11 he had shows cancelled, presumably

his Middle East origins frightened off promoters, and later he became an active

campaigner against the Iraq war. Mostly though, Omid Jalili was focused on finding the funny in Britain's

cocktail of cultures, both in his stand-up and a host of TV and film appearances. His latest

project is a comedy show being broadcast in Farsi on the BBC's Persian TV service, a project

he wants to do in English too, which prompts a question,

does good comedy always translate? Well, Omid Jalili joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Great. Stephen Saka, my friend, my fellow presenter in the business of show, man who is so

unbelievably good-looking and thin that he walks into a snooker hall

and start chalking his head. I am so happy to be here. This is one of my favorite shows.

Yeah, but if you carry on like that, this won't be an interview, it'll be a monologue.

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