Giving comedy a shot

COMEDIAN Shappi Khorsandi didn’t have it easy growing up.

She moved to England with her family from Iran in 1976. Her father was a journalist and satirist. When he returned to Iran in 1979 — the year the Shah of Iran was deposed — crowds gathered outside his newspaper offices and chanted for his execution. He fled the country.

As a child exiled in London, Khorsandi fielded callers issuing death threats on the phone. “I remember, once, when I was about 11, I actually called the police because I was so freaked out by somebody phoning us,” she says.