Neema Nazeri wants you to know he's 'a real comedian'
Best known for his online sketches, the Toronto-based stand-up is determined to wow audiences on stage
Neema Nazeri has been doing impressions for as long as he can remember. Long before the Toronto-based comedian ever hit a professional stage, or posted his first video, he was making people laugh with his impersonations.
"When I was a kid my friends would always be like, hey 'Can you do an impression of this teacher? Can you do an impression of this guy?'" he says. "And then I do it, and then they would laugh and I'm like 'Oh shit, I'm actually good at this.' Every family gathering we had, my parents would always be like 'All right Neema, it's end of the night. Go up and make us laugh'"
When he got older, Nazeri made a brief attempt at doing something other than comedy for a living. After starting a degree in kinesiology, he quickly realized that if he didn't pursue his dream of performing, he was going to be miserable. He quit kinesiology, enrolled in Humber College's Comedy Writing and Performance program, and got very serious about being funny.
"I didn't miss a class," he says. "I was never late. I wanted to really learn the ins and outs of my craft from the very start because I was like 'I'm 100 per cent in… I'd rather sleep on the streets than go to another lecture hall and learn about biophysics or whatever the hell it is.'"
Nowadays, Nazeri's impersonation repertoire includes a weird grab bag of celebrities, including Joe Rogan, Gordon Ramsey, David Goggins, Gary Vaynerchuk and Bad Bunny. It also includes a lot of accents. As the child of immigrants from Iran growing up in Toronto's multicultural suburbs, Nazeri was fascinated by accents from an early age. When his parents would have him perform at family parties as a kid, one of his go-to bits was impersonating his heavily accented mother at a drive-through and trying to communicate with the worker on the other side, who also had a very thick accent.
When George Carlin did his famous accent-based bit "New York Voices" in the early 1970s, it was considered a bit risky. Carlin starts the bit by saying "You can do your own group… but crossing over, it's not so good." In 2025, an Iranian-Canadian doing sketches in a Nigerian or Filipino accent seems not just risky, but deeply ill-advised. But Nazeri has been doing exactly that, both on TikTok and live, for years, with nary a complaint. The trick, he says, is two things: firstly, don't be mean-spirited.
"I'm not here trying to be purposely offensive or to go for shock value," he says. "I'm never trying to do that. I'm genuinely just doing stuff I do when the cameras are off, in front of my friends, in front of my family, and I'm just showcasing it for the world to see."
The second thing is you have to know what you're talking about and understand what's funny about cultural differences. These aren't surface-level jokes about people talking funny. Nazeri does his research and is able to go deep on different communities' peccadillos.
"I genuinely try to learn the ins and outs of every accent, the mannerisms, the inflections," he says. "The way I grew up in Toronto, I grew up around the United Nations… So it's like I'm an extension of the people I grew up around. That's the way I see it… I don't see it as getting away with it. I just see it as this is just who I am."
In addition to appearing in his own content, Nazeri is starring in his first feature film. Please, After You is about Ali, an Iranian immigrant whose carefully laid plans for achieving the Canadian Dream get turned upside down when his good-natured but chronically bumbling cousin Omid — played by Nazeri — suddenly arrives from Tehran. Nazeri says that a co-leading role in a film felt like a massive coup for him, particularly as he only had two previous professional acting gigs.
"One was an RBC commercial and another was on The Boys as a Syrian terrorist," he says. "The way I actually got the role was the producers saw my stuff online, they thought it was funny, and they thought it would be perfect for the role. So they got me to audition, and it was exactly what they wanted. And they booked me right away."
Nazeri started doing stand-up, content creation and acting at the same time, around 2015, but really blew up on TikTok and Instagram during the pandemic. When he did his first stand-up tour after COVID restrictions were lifted, he says it felt like his profile eclipsed his actual talent on stage.
"It was very on the nose," he says. "Here's this accent, here's why I can do this accent, blah blah blah."
He is currently back on the road again, and this time, things are different. He describes his material this time around as "light years" ahead of where it was on his last tour. It's more coherent, more story-driven, and truer to himself.
"It's much better, but it's also more in line with who I am and what my online content is," he says. "You still have the elements of traditional stand-up, but mixed in with my brand and things that people see online."
Nazeri credits his improvement on stage, in part, to the fact that he relocated to Australia for much of 2024. He wanted to see if his material would translate to an audience in another country. While he was down there, he logged an almost unbelievable amount of stage time, doing roughly 600 sets in 10 months.
"You can't cheat the reps," he says, adding that that was more sets than he'd done in the previous three or four years.
"A lot of the sets were 20 minutes long," he says. "Twenty-five, 30, I had some 40s, so it's like, you learn way faster when you get that much stage time. That was the biggest takeaway for me was just getting the reps in, because you just can't fake it. If you look at the difference from the set I did the previous tour, I was way more performing the jokes. Now I'm just being my funny self on stage, and it's more natural. It's more me."
He adds that even his fans, the people who pay to see him, are caught off guard by how good he is on stage now.
"The most common thing I hear after my stand-up shows now is… 'I didn't think it was going to be as good as it was,' or 'This was way better than I expected'" he says. "There's so many comments like that, and I don't blame the people because they don't really know me for my stand up yet… I just want people to know that, like I am a stand-up after all. This is how I started. I'm not just an online, internet comedian. I'm a real comedian."
Please, After You is playing May 21 at Cineplex Yonge-Dundas in Toronto, May 22 at Cineplex Vaughan in Vaughan, Ont., and June 5 at Scotiabank Theatre in Halifax.
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