One striking aspect of his gigs is the racial diversity of the audience

One striking aspect of his gigs is the racial diversity of the audience. Where most comedians wonder aloud if there are any Scousers or Welsh in tonight, Djalili asks Iranians, Indians, even Jews to make themselves known, and they do. Many, it seems, feel represented by Djalili, who was raised in Kensington and now lives in East Sheen. It’s something which Djalili admits not feeling entirely comfortable with, and a routine in No Agenda reflects his unease – after 9/11 there was sense of solidarity among ethnic minorities but, Djalili wonders, where should we draw the line: at the Turkish? The Irish? No, he decides: at the Chinese. So does he chafe at being cast as the Everyman of ethnic minority comedy? “You feel good in the sense that your act is universal – but I can’t be representative of every single religious minority, because that’s dangerous – if you’re not representative you can say something that pisses them off.”What’s more, it’s probable that many of his British audience assume that Djalili is Muslim.

He isn’t; he’s Ba’hai, a fact which, he says, he has tried and failed to communicate to audiences in the past “People assume I’m Muslim, which I have no problem with. I know a lot of Muslims get turned off by the fact that I’m not a Muslim, but I’m not trying to represent the Muslim faith. I defend Islam because I feel there’s a lot of Islamophobia in the world right now.”And while he’s happy to present himself as “an ambassador of the Middle East”, sometimes Djalili just can’t keep up with events He says he’s developing a routine about the Danish cartoons. And while he cracked one joke about Iran’s nuclear programme – about how Iranians will travel wherever there’s chicken and uranium – Djalili confesses with a smile that, on the night I saw him in Cambridge, he simply forgot a longer routine about why Iran shouldn’t have the bomb.If Djalili is feeling the pressure of his unique position, he doesn’t show it, putting his case across freely and peppered with plenty of easygoing jokes. By contrast, the subject that seems to trouble him in our conversation is the axing of a sitcom he appeared in three years ago with Whoopi Goldberg in the US, Whoopi.

The sitcom, he assures me, was a ratings success in the US, and its demise followed a previous piece of bad luck for Djalili in the US – in 2002 NBC pulled a show it had offered Djalili because US troops were going into the Middle East. (It was thought that Americans would balk at the prospect of being entertained by an Arab-looking comedian.) But, he proudly tells me, he is only the second British comedian, after Eddie Izzard, to have been awarded a comedy special by another American network, the cable channel HBO.Make no mistake, Djalili is ambitious. He is happy to admit that when both the BBC and NBC came calling in 2002, he took the big money that the US network was offering: “The opportunities are huge out there, but I’ve always been irked that things happen for me in America before they happen here.” That said, he will soon be doing a pilot for the BBC, a sketch and stand-up show. Still, while he says that he agrees with his family’s desire to stay in the UK, you feel he’d love to be pushing his career forward full-time in the US.He also feels that he had much to offer the US by his simply appearing on Whoopi as an amusing Middle Eastern handyman: “America was so xenophobic. There was me taking on America, and, though I didn’t single-handedly change perceptions, from all the reviews everyone says I was the funniest character in the show.” If that sounds a bit gauche, he is, sometimes But it’s working.

His feature-film parts are improving – from having to flesh out stock swarthy types in films such as Gladiator and The Mummy, Djalili is getting bigger, more complex roles. He’s soon to appear as, for instance, Heath Ledger’s assistant in the forthcoming Casanova and in a leading role as a New York Jew in a yet-to-be-announced production.Djalili clearly thrives on being a poster boy for what you might call Western-Arab integration. He tells me excitedly about how he played an Asian tsunami benefit gig last year in Qatar before the Emir, Bill Clinton and Pele, among others, where he was the star turn But he will have to be wary. Djalili knows exactly how closely watched he’ll be as a British-Iranian comic striving for success around the world, and particularly in the US. A misjudged line about Middle Eastern secret service violence in Whoopi earned him ferocious criticism on a host of Iranian websites, a slip-up which, though he didn’t write the line, he acknowledges as his fault.For Djalili, though, concerns such as these are “details”. “There’s no other guy from my background who has filled those sizes of theatres.

The most significant thing from an ethnic point of view is being a foreigner moving into the mainstream – that’s the whole point, I think.” Let’s hope it’s that simple.’No Agenda’, various venues until 26 March ( www.omid-djalili ) ‘Casanova’ is out on Friday. Are you just that bit West Indian? We’re not all as far gone as Ali G but, for the joke to have worked when Sacha Baron Cohen first proposed it nearly eight years ago, it had to have had wide resonance. It assumed most people under 30 knew a full-on “wigga” when they saw one, and that quite a lot had rubbed off – music, language, clothes – into the mainstream. Baron Cohen, an upper-middly Jewish public-schoolboy who did history at Cambridge, was reflecting 60 years and more of fashionable interest in the West Indies and West Indians. Ian Fleming and Noel Coward were pioneer, post-war, smart settlers in Jamaica. Colin Tennant was on Mustique a little later, bringing the Princess Margaret set with him.