Comedy / daliso chaponda
‘Topical Storm’: Daliso Chaponda navigates the news
First coming to mainstream attention on Britain’s Got Talent in 2017, Daliso Chaponda has since gone on to perform internationally, while amassing over 300 million views – and counting – of his standup online.
He is a TV and radio regular in the UK, where he has toured three times, and is also a writer of sci-fi, murder mystery, fantasy and children’s fiction.
Chaponda is currently back on the road with a brand-new standup show, Topical Storm, which will visit The Wardrobe Theatre on March 7th.
But rather than being about the news, it’s about the nature of the news medium itself, and how we navigate it in a contemporary ‘post-truth’ age.
“I’ve been doing topical jokes about the news for around 20 years now”, he muses, “and I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel like news has changed.
“When I set out to write the show it felt like stories were getting increasingly crazy, like we couldn’t even agree on reality. It used to be that there would be one set of facts we all accepted and then we’d have different opinions about them, right?
“But now anytime anything happens there are all these different bubbles and if you read the coverage in one paper versus another paper it’s like two opposite things.”
Topical Storm sees Chaponda taking a satirical look at some of the contemporary stories making headlines, exploring legacy and new media – including blogs, gossip, and the thorny world of AI, which has recently impacted his personal life.
“AI has made it so much harder to distinguish between real news and fake news because now you can make a headline look real”, he considers.
“Like, my father is a politician; he’s Malawi’s current Foreign Minister. I talk in the show about how last year a totally nonsense article about him went viral and it was so hard to get it taken down.
“It was kind of funny because it was implying that my father was going to be the next President of Malawi when he had no ambitions about that at all. Even in his party people were thinking ‘Oh, did you create this story to make yourself look good?’”
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Daliso Chaponda: Topical Storm (age recommendation 14+) is at The Wardrobe Theatre on March 7 at 7.30pm. Tickets are available at www.thewardrobetheatre.com.
All photos: Steve Ullathorne
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