Review by Paul Fleckney

By his own admission, Michael Che didn’t need to come to the Edinburgh Fringe. His career is in rude health, with regular appearances on some of America's most prestigious comedy shows, most recently a weekly slot on Saturday Night Live. But despite his starry, starry status, his room at the Stand was only two-thirds full on the night I attended – and during a short run that's now over.

What he gives us in the cheekily titled Six Stars is a display of a comic in supreme command of his material. Perched atop a bar stool sipping a pint of lager, he is is relaxed mood, even by his standards.

Like other American comics who like to ruffle feathers, Che has some jokes about Christianity, under the delusion that religion is as big a deal here as it is in the US. Somebody needs to do a missionary trip across the pond and tell them that we don’t really care. Still, his mini routine about the incongruity of Jesus being our saviour as well as a carpenter is a very strong start. He’s more likely to have upset people when he professes his allegiance to Donald Trump, who is about as welcome in Scotland as Ed Miliband.

He eases himself into more political territory with a brilliant section on how Brooklyn has gentrified, and how the same could be achieved in some of the tastier parts of Syria. Che gets round to the subject of cat-calling – a subject that got him in trouble when he mocked an infamous video of a woman walking through Harlem getting lots of unwanted attention. However questionable that may have been, the routine he spins out of that is sublime, with some very funny observations on the double standards of sex toys and being able to scream at One Direction.

There are some interesting passages that go contrary to the trend for instant judgment, in which he points out that people often say things they don’t mean. He dreads hearing a white person say the n-word, he says, mainly because he’s then expected to fight them.

Boo hiss to some hack observations about the internet giving today’s youth easy access to porn, and even mentioning deep-fried food, but otherwise it’s a show that proves that even when he appears to be cruising, Che really can nail it.

Review date: 26 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: Stand 3 and 4