Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Emo Majok has a great backstory as a Sudanese immigrant born in an Ethiopian refugee camp who grew up in Australia. He's an instinctive joker who joined the labour force at 14 and was belatedly encouraged to perform comedy by his young daughter.

With a slightly complicated, under-explained domestic situation, whereby he's separated from his children's mother but is now engaged to another woman, he's invested in modern dating but still offers a nod to the traditional, cattle-related dowries of his culture. He’s ambitious too, and it's hard not to warm to the witty hustle of his merchandise and his overflowing delight in the novelty of performing stand-up all over the world.

Unfortunately, though, while he's got some acute insights into racism, dating outside his race and the privilege clash of being someone who privately educates his kids even as his mother still transports groceries on her head, he tends to draw only the most superficial conclusions.

A one-night stand with a white girl and glow-in-the-dark condom builds disappointingly to feeble punchlines about lightsabers. And the compelling subtext of his struggling mental health, which underpins the tale of the 34-year-old getting IDed in his quest for alcohol while supposedly looking after his then ten-year-old daughter, doesn't even manage to sustain its wry, truth-out-of-the-mouths-of-babes setup, wearily predictable in its denouement.

Several of Majok's pullback-and-reveals are similarly signposted. And when he shares a tale of reconnecting with a gay friend after a long time apart, he implies it's progressive and akin to a thoroughly modern comedy of manners, apparently oblivious to his crassly homophobic generalisations.

Elsewhere, an episode in which he joins a march of belligerent Covid sceptics demanding freedom from government lockdown laws, simply out of some genetic, ancestral will to protest and show resistance to bigoted oppression, is initially very funny. But beyond the compelling premise, exceptional for a comic who's resistant to digging too deep, it's not mined hard.

Anyone can be forgiven for ignorance of a culture with a different language on the other side of the world. But if Majok is as serious about pursuing his stand-up dream as he maintains he is, he's got to get beyond amazement at the fact that they speak French in Montreal. One can only imagine how that might go down at the Just For Laughs Festival.

There are other promising flashes, as when he enthusiastically grandstands about giving change to white beggars and calls bullshit on the admonishment of children to finish their plates because there are children starving in Africa, pointing out the smug, supposed superiority of Western cuisine that this is predicated on.

Majok is infectiously upbeat, as anyone might be if they were one of the few who escaped a refugee camp of 60,000 souls. And smilingly charismatic. But he really has to put more time and thought into his writing.

• Emo Majok: African Aussie is on at Underbelly Bristo Square at 8.30pm

Review date: 10 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square