Brighton Fringe comedy review

Wading through Marma​lade is rather what it feels like to seek laughs in Thao Thanh Cao’s heavy-going hour. Her dry deadpan delivery verges on the joyless and the writing labours often obvious jokes.

She has an interesting tale to tell – and the audience are enraptured by her childhood brush with death and her experience as a Vietnamese ‘boat person’ refugee to Australia, lucky to survive being adrift for 42 days. These are not funny sections, as she rightly acknowledges – her attempt to lighten the migration story with an inappropriate and weak dick joke tarnishes the impact – but they are interesting.

Another story about a racist encounter on the platform of a Berlin railway station prompts some self-analysis, which concludes in an empowering broadside against ‘woke’ culture which refreshingly avoids the usual arguments given by fragile white men. But again, this is not essentially a comic section.

The hour starts as aridly as we mean to go on, with an earnest poll of what brought people here and what precisely in her programme blurb appealed. It’s definitely more market research than ice-breaker and gives no confidence that we’re heading for an hour of LOLs.

One of the respondents liked the fact she’s performing every night of the Brighton Fringe, and you have to admire the work ethic in a festival in which most performers who aren’t Ladyboys Of Bangkok perform for just a  couple of nights.

She also has to work hard for every laugh she gets, as she doesn’t have the natural funny bones to cover the weaknesses in writing, which often extends little more than the mildly amusing comments most of us might toss out in the course of a day.

For example, she spots an eaterie called The Standard Indian Restaurant and goes into a long riff about how ‘standard’ is an unambitious aim for food, which doesn’t progress that notion, just repeats it.

In another gag she imagines being a lesbian, but then dismisses the idea because in a relationship there would be a dispute about who gets the power tools. That’s a long route to get to a lame stereotype.

Personal stories such as the one about getting horribly drunk on a first date have more of a hook, and she slowly proves herself more personable than her unexciting delivery suggests. But she’ll just as willingly do some generic material about a communion wafer not being a decent snack that hardly inspires.

It all feels as if her ambitions for comedy are akin to what that Standard restaurant is promising of its food.

• Marmalade is on at Presuming Ed's, Brighton, until May 10 and at the Edinburgh Fringe this August.

Review date: 16 May 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett