Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

What an awful title. But don’t be put off by the promise of juvenile sniggers or some niche complaints about festival marketing – Jame D’Souza’s Fringe debut is actually an assured offering about his formative teenage years.

It’s a neatly put-together show, gag-driven but with a decent sense of story. And while D’Souza isn’t the most charismatic of performers – indeed, his uncool beta-male status is key to the anecdotes – the graft that has gone into writing more than compensates.

The hour gets off to a false start with a flimsy preamble about his mum being on Facebook and an email exchange he had with a scammer, which is weaker than most of the myriad examples of such crook-baiting that you can easily find elsewhere.

But once he gets into the meat of the story, his self-deprecating wit and willingness to embrace the cringe of his teenage self are constantly amusing, with plenty of embarrassing incidents to draw upon. The most mortifying involve Tear Me Down, the band he set up to try to impress the goth girl he had a crush on, and they truly were terrible. Nor is that the only dubious thing he attempted to woo her. 

He paints a relatable picture of life as an unassertive, awkward 18-year-old idiot in a rubbish small town – Staines in his case – and how he still struggles to let go of that past even at 27. At least he’s much better at talking to people now and has some sparky banter with the front row.

This show does more than merely invite the audience to laugh at his mortifying teenage self - though that’s a big part of it. D’Souza has a geeky commitment to proper punchlines, and there are a few turns in the story – some real, some surely comic artifices he couldn’t resist for the gag – to keep you interested. 

Callbacks and running jokes are used sparingly but effectively, while he takes on side issues such as veganism, unthoughtful gifts and being half-Swiss, half-Indian (and how nobody sees the first bit of that) without detracting from the main narrative. His enduring low-status position keeps him likeable, and while this is not a showy debut, it is a quietly impressive one.

• Jamie D'Souza: Stop Drawing Willies On My Poster is on at Pleasance Courtyard at 7.10pm

Review date: 7 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard