How Mawaan Rizwan Accidentally Became the UN Secretary-General of Silliness
Mawaan Rizwan and the Global Collapse of Earnestness
By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between Gatwick and Guantánamo
When Pakistani-British comedian-turned-auteur Mawaan Rizwan dropped “Juice” on BBC Three last spring, the world was busy stockpiling iodine tablets and arguing on Twitter about whether the ocean was now officially soup. In that context, a surreal six-part comedy about a meek Londoner who discovers his mother is a crime boss felt almost quaint—like worrying about overdue library fines while Rome burns. Yet, from Lagos to Lima, viewers found themselves binge-watching a brown kid in sparkly hot-pants navigate filial piety, ketamine, and the British class system with the manic grace of someone trying to outrun both Brexit and their own mother.
This is not another profile about how “representation matters”—though, yes, Rizwan did manage to squeeze queer, Muslim, immigrant joy onto the same BBC that once gave us “Mind Your Language.” What’s interesting is how the show’s very frivolity has become a geopolitical act. In an era when the planet’s loudest democracies are busy electing TikTok stars to high office and authoritarian regimes are rebranding concentration camps as “vocational theme parks,” the simple insistence on silliness is starting to look like sedition. When Rizwan’s character sells knock-off Viagra to fund his dance career, he isn’t just committing petty fraud; he’s performing a small, glitter-covered insurrection against the global imperative to be Useful and Productive™.
International audiences, battered by inflation, wildfires, and the inexplicable persistence of Imagine Dragons, have responded with the kind of gratitude usually reserved for UN air-drops. In South Korea, “Juice” trended on Watcha despite lacking zombies or pale men crying in stairwells. German critics, a demographic historically allergic to levity, hailed it as “Brechtian but with better lighting.” Meanwhile, Netflix quietly added Urdu subtitles and prayed nobody would notice the jokes about imperialism. The algorithm, that omniscient potato, registered a 400 % spike in “chaotic British brown” content and immediately green-lit three knock-offs starring white people named Finneas.
Rizwan himself has become an accidental export, the human equivalent of those little sachets of emergency chilli sauce you find in a Nairobi boarding lounge: compact, unexpectedly potent, and guaranteed to upset at least one immigration officer. Touring Australia last month, he sold out the Sydney Opera House—no small feat for a man whose previous gig was explaining Grindr to elderly Punjabis on YouTube. The Australian press, ever eager to reduce brown identity to trauma or tandoori, asked how it felt to be “breaking barriers.” Rizwan replied he was mainly trying to break even. The quote went viral in fourteen languages, proving once again that poverty is the most universal dialect.
Back home, the British establishment remains unsure what to do with him. The same government that strips citizenship by text message has invited him to Downing Street receptions because, well, he photographs nicely and hasn’t yet set anything on fire. Meanwhile, the tabloids oscillate between praising his “plucky immigrant hustle” and fretting that he’s indoctrinating the nation’s youth into homosexuality via interpretive dance. Both takes sell papers, which is all Fleet Street has ever cared about since the invention of movable type.
What makes Rizwan globally significant is not that he’s solved racism, homophobia, or the British cuisine crisis, but that he’s refused to package himself as the antidote. Instead, he offers the radical proposition that joy is still legal tender, valid even when the exchange rate is brutal. In a marketplace where every minority artist is expected to moonlight as a policy paper, Rizwan’s insistence on nonsense is quietly revolutionary. It’s also wildly cost-effective: glitter is cheaper than reparations, and considerably easier to source.
So, as COP delegates argue over carbon credits and billionaires race to colonise Mars for the tax breaks, consider the modest triumph of a man in gold lamé hot-pants teaching the world that survival can look like shimmying. If that sounds frivolous, remember: empires fall, currencies collapse, but someone, somewhere will always risk arrest to laugh at their mother. And that, dear reader, might just be the last reliable supply chain we have left.
