Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Jaz Mattu says his debut is ‘about me getting into stand-up and working out who I am’, which is not the most alluring premise, not least because you might have hoped he’d have a decent answer to that question before he embarks on a month-long Fringe run.

Emerges is a typical walk-before-you-can-run debut. Mattu’s clearly full of excitement for his new journey into comedy but falling short of technical expertise on how to do the job. He has a confident stage presence, as he’s also a musician – though we get only a tantalising glimpse of those talents here – yet the energy’s often a little off, exposing the fact his skits and stand-up haven’t been exposed to audiences much before. 

A montage features mock-ups of the career path he envisages: Live At The Apollo, Netflix special, the lot. It’s his fantasy - perhaps by stating it, he hopes it will manifest - but it’s unclear why we should care.

He tries a few comedy styles on for style, from Jimmy Carr-style offensive one-liners to Gaulier clowns and drawing caricatures of people, like a street artist n a sluggish one-gig sketch. He admits he can’t do deeply personal trauma-dump routines, as he hasn’t had many challenges in life (of course he hasn’t), so he gets Chat GPT to write him some material. It all smacks of ideas that might have sounded good in his head but not so much in the real world…

Comedy in-jokes include a mentor who insists he guests on podcasts, makes TikToks and enters crappy open mic contests ‘I’m just not the right kind of act for competitions,’ Mattu says, airily, like a badge of honour. The problem with all this mockery of the trappings of the circuit is that he never establishes that he’s funny enough not to have to jump through the hoops. One decent routine about tall people having ‘height privilege’ does not a career make.

By the end, Mattu discovers what he wants from comedy: to bring joy. This bland truism is far from the inspirational revelation he would hope it to be. 

Yet that could be achievable. He hits his stride in the build-up to this conclusion, overseeing an anarchic gameshow. There are still kinks to be ironed out, but he’s a personable host with enough authority to run the audience activities while conducting the dafter elements of the chaos, getting fully into the spirit of things.

Has he figured out who he is for the stage? Possibly. He could, finally, be on the right track. The bottom line, though is that he needs to stop dreaming about all that his comedy career could offer for him and think about what it might offer audiences instead.
 

Review date: 15 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House