On tour
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The profile · researched 3 October 2026
From a Humber College comedy course to the Dubai Comedy Festival: Neema Naz's decade-long climb
Neema Nazeri, the Toronto-born son of Iranian parents who performs as Neema Naz, turned nightly open mics and a YouTube channel into sold theatres across four continents. In autumn 2026 he has two dates on sale — a festival slot in Dubai on 17 October and a club double bill in Cleveland on 12 November — while working New York rooms in between.
Toronto, a dropped degree and a comedy diploma
Neema Nazeri was born in Toronto to Iranian parents and grew up between two sets of rules: Persian at home, Canadian at school. He was enrolled at the University of Toronto when he decided entertainment was the plan, and left. His parents had no connection to the industry and no map for what he was proposing, and backed him anyway. His brother Omid has since become his manager, and the touring company behind his shows, The Estupid Group, keeps the operation inside the family.
Rather than freelancing his way in, he took the schooling route, signing up to Humber College's comedy programme in 2014. Club biographies date the start of his stand-up career to that autumn, and the pattern from then on was volume: performing nightly around Toronto while building a YouTube channel in parallel. The two halves fed each other for the best part of a decade before either produced a living.
The material came out of the city he grew up in. He works through the accents and habits of the friend groups around him — the many ethnicities of a Toronto high school, the parental lecture about girls, the immigrant household's internal logic — and treats the impressions as tribute rather than target practice. He has described it as trying to represent other people's cultures as an extension of them, which is also the argument he makes when the appropriation question comes up.
The Russell Peters jump
The break was a phone call. In July 2022 Russell Peters asked him to open a show in Ottawa in front of 10,000 people. His previous largest audience had been 500. Peters kept booking him after that, including a Toronto date played to a crowd of 50,000 — a scale jump most comics spend fifteen years approaching by increments.
The same year he mounted his first headline run, I'm Your Sugar Daddy, which club biographies credit with more than 15,000 tickets across Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, Montreal, San Francisco and Toronto. Support slots followed with Theo Von, Howie Mandel, Omid Djalili, Mo Gilligan and Maz Jobrani, and his own headline dates spread to Sydney, Berlin and Melbourne.
The online side kept pace. The figure quoted on venue and festival pages is upwards of 1.5 billion views across his channels, with endorsements from Gary Vaynerchuk, David Goggins, Gordon Ramsay, Kevin Hart and Andrew Schulz used as shorthand for the reach. The useful thing about the Peters story is that it proves the clips convert: a man with a billion views still had to be handed a 10,000-seat room by someone who had already filled it.
The work that isn't a clip
The most substantial non-stand-up credit is Please, After You, a Canadian comedy directed by Rob Michaels from a screenplay by Amir Kahnamouee, in which Nazeri plays Omid, a sweet and clumsy cousin who arrives from Iran hoping to claim refugee status and derails the Canadian-dream plans of his engineer relative Ali, played by Sammy Azero. The cast also includes Juno Rinaldi, Kris Siddiqi and Julie Nolke; the film runs 93 minutes and was produced by Vortex Media.
Its path was a festival one. The film played the Borsos Competition at the Whistler Film Festival in 2024, screened at the 2025 Canadian Film Festival, and then went out in limited commercial release later that year. Its most recent industry marker came in 2026, when composer Erica Procunier was nominated for best original score at the 14th Canadian Screen Awards — a reminder that the picture is still circulating in the Canadian industry's accounting rather than sitting finished and forgotten.
Elsewhere there is a credit on Amazon Prime's The Boys and commercial work for a US bank. The talking half of the catalogue is Estupid Neema, his podcast, which runs rotating guests rather than a comedy-circuit roster, and the parody bulletin Man News, which is the closest thing he has to a recurring format.
My Estupid Life, and where it has been
The current touring show is My Estupid Life, which began its run in 2025 and was announced as a global itinerary: North America first, then the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East. The billing is plain about the subject matter — the animated tales of growing up in an immigrant household — and leans on what the clips established, meaning original characters, impersonations, and a steady supply of material about his mother.
The documented stops show the room sizes it moves between. He played Boom Chicago on Amsterdam's Rozengracht on 26 September 2025, a 20:00 start at €25 general admission, performed in English. In North America that autumn he was at the Regent Theater in Los Angeles on 15 November 2025 and the Punch Line in Houston on 19 November 2025, then opened 2026 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale on 6 January. The spread from a 25-euro Amsterdam improv house to a Los Angeles theatre and back to a chain club is the shape of a career that is bigger online than it is institutionally.
That unevenness shows up in the paperwork too. Listing aggregators carry only a fragment of the schedule — one upcoming date on Songkick against a far longer run of venue-sold shows — because the tour is booked through promoters and clubs directly rather than fed into a single ticketing spine.
Standing in October 2026
Two dates are on sale. The nearer is Dubai, where he appears at the Dubai Comedy Festival on Saturday 17 October 2026 at the New Covent Garden Theatre in the Mall of the Emirates, doors at 21:00, tickets from AED 150, restricted to 16 and over. The festival runs from 9 to 18 October 2026 and the company he is keeping is instructive: Mo Gilligan and Katherine Ryan on 12 October, Munawar Faruqui on 11 October, Zarna Garg and Shane Todd on 16 October, John Achkar across 17 and 18 October, spread over Dubai Opera, the Emirates Theatre, Pepperoni Comedy Club and his own venue.
The second is American and smaller. On 12 November 2026 he plays the Funny Bone Comedy Club on Main Avenue in Cleveland at 19:00, billed alongside Marc-Anthony Sinagoga, with resale seats listed from around $66. Between the two he is doing the unglamorous maintenance work of a club comic: Broadway Comedy Club in New York lists him across its Main Room and Red Room on 3, 4, 5, 25, 26 and 31 October 2026, several slots a night in places.
What is missing from the record is criticism. There is interview coverage — a Dutch outlet ran a profile around the Amsterdam show in September 2025, built around his argument that material drawn from his own household is uncancellable — but no body of published reviews of the touring hour. His standing currently rests on ticket movement, festival billing and view counts rather than on press verdicts, which is the normal condition for a comic who came up through the phone rather than the broadsheets.
The show, now
The show on sale now is My Estupid Life, and its billing is specific about the content: stories of growing up in an immigrant household, impersonations drawn from a multicultural Toronto adolescence, original characters, and a long-running strand about his mother, with a local roast of whichever city he has landed in. The two formats differ. The Dubai Comedy Festival date on 17 October 2026 is a solo headline slot at the New Covent Garden Theatre in the Mall of the Emirates, doors at 21:00, from AED 150, over-16s only. The Cleveland date on 12 November 2026 is a 19:00 club bill at the Funny Bone on Main Avenue shared with Marc-Anthony Sinagoga, with resale tickets from about $66. No running time is published for either, and neither the venues nor the promoter list a longer support bill. Earlier stops on the same tour ran at theatre scale in Los Angeles and Glendale and at improv-house scale in Amsterdam, where the 26 September 2025 show was a 20:00 start at €25, performed in English. There is no body of published critical reviews of the hour; what exists instead is interview coverage, repeat bookings from Russell Peters, and a festival line-up that places him on the same ten-day bill as Katherine Ryan and Mo Gilligan.
Researched from neemanaz.com · neemanaz.com · broadwaycomedyclub.com · improv.com · spencer-magazine.com · boomchicago.nl · detour.songkick.com · dubaicomedyfest.ae