It's been a whopping ten years since I last saw Aamer live on stage, and the various more casual interactions in the meantime have firmly made him more of a "human I happen to have met" than a minor celebrity that lives in a completely different world.
So I'm kind of lucky that a spare ticket turned up for a show he was performing that I had otherwise decided to skip as tonight's set was quite excellent, and I suspect I enjoyed it even more than The Truth Hurts a decade ago.
Not much has changed. Aamer is still precisely (and wonderfully) mocking the obvious topics of racism and privilege, but now he's doing it with the more powerful contexts of wars in the Middle East and more personally, becoming a father.
As before the insight isn't necessarily novel - you may have cracked the same jokes and made the same observations yourself in whichever generic brown social media group with a level of intelligence you happen to be in. But with the platform and the ease and confidence and charm in which Aamer delivers, the message is compounded to a sublime level.
There was lots of laughter, pride, hope and assurances tonight, in an hour that flew by way too quickly.
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