“This guy had obviously had some sort of idea in his head,” she says, “and I had just shaken up that idea and kind of opened his eyes.”
And that is how comedians, when they’re as good as El-Ghorri, change the world.
It helps that laughter comes easily to her. Even fasting during Ramadan and fresh from the gym, she radiates energy. She talks fast, laughs constantly and brushes off compliments she hasn’t got time for.
Her recent run of success is every comedian’s dream to-do list: Taskmaster, Live at the Apollo, a role in a Bafta-winning comedy (Mr Bigstuff), her own Radio 4 special (A Match Made Inshallah), a debut solo tour and, coming next year, her first novel. She seems surprised by it all.
“I never, ever, ever thought I’d get on TV. I never thought I would do a tour. When I got the call for Taskmaster, I put the phone down. I was like, what? Same with Live at the Apollo. I was like, no, no, no. Because these things don’t happen to me.”
They do though. And they’re deserved. It takes great skill to feel like everyone’s mate when, as a British Moroccan Muslim woman, she could so easily feel “other” to a big chunk of the viewing audience. El-Ghorri has elevated relatability into an art form. She makes it look effortless.
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“I don’t know if I try, if I’m honest with you. I just talk about my life and then people are like, ‘Oh my god, that happens to me too.’”
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It might be instinctive, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. Especially when she ends up carrying the weight of several communities just by being out there. Especially when people within those communities push back. She’s criticised, for example, by conservative Muslims (“They’re like, ‘Why do you swear on stage?’ I’m like, ‘Because that’s who I am. If you don’t like it, then don’t come’.”)
She was born and raised in Hackney, East London but sometimes told she’ll never really be British. When she visits Morocco, where her family is from, she’s told she isn’t truly Moroccan either. In comedy, despite all that success, she still gets dismissed as a diversity hire.
“Every space I occupy, someone’s trying to push me out of it for one reason or another,” she says. “It’s really isolating. I’ll be honest with you, it’s really lonely.”
Earlier this year another layer was added to that complicated public life. In February she published a deeply personal Instagram post revealing that she had been diagnosed with Stage 1 endometrial cancer in 2025, undergone a hysterectomy, and is now living with sudden-onset medical menopause at 44. It brought a wave of support from fellow comics including Katherine Ryan and Sarah Millican.
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None of it has dimmed the energy she brings to the stage, and none of it undermines the craft behind it. El-Ghorri treats stand-up as a job, not a calling. She often talks about it as a contract with the audience.
She says, “It’s not about me, it’s about you. You’ve paid to come to this show – I have to make you laugh. You have to have a good time.”
Representation, she insists, isn’t something she consciously writes towards. She focuses on jokes and delivery. The wider cultural meaning arrives later, often whether she wants it to or not.
And for all those heavy, isolating moments, it’s been worth it. El-Ghorri recalls a show at the Bill Murray comedy club in Islington, when 12 women wearing hijabs came to see her perform. She cried afterwards.
“Those girls were there for me,” she recalls. “If I wasn’t on the bill, they would not be there. Because there was someone that was like them on stage, talking about things that they know about, things that they’ve lived, things that they’ve experienced.”
The flip side is the pressure she feels when a set doesn’t land. Every comic has a bad gig sometimes. Most of them don’t have to feel like they’re letting so many sides down.
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“It becomes ‘Women are not funny. Muslim women are not funny. People don’t understand what I’m carrying.”
That pressure hasn’t slowed her down. Her first national tour, Cockney Stacking Doll, runs from April to June and includes a headline date at the Hackney Empire. She has joined the cast of BBC comedy Boarders and her debut children’s book, The Perks of My Hijab, arrives next year from Simon & Schuster (“No ghost, right?” she says. “None of that nonsense. I did it all myself. The blood, sweat and tears – I cannot tell you, the crying, the sleeplessness.”)
Beneath it all sits someone who wants to make people laugh. El-Ghorri wants young women in hijabs to see someone like them on stage. She wants the bloke in Bromley to leave a gig with his mind blown wide open.
And she wants to do it all while being, as she puts it, “just a girl from the hood chatting shit on stage”.
Do not underestimate the power of chatting shit on stage.
Fatiha El-Ghorri’s Cockney Stacking Doll tour runs from 25 April-7 June.
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