Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Few stand-ups come out of the gate with a distinctive comic voice, but Jin Hao Li has done just that. He speaks in a quiet pseudo-whisper, a fragile sing-song tone to his voice that is calming, hypnotic and ethereal.

That’s apt for his solo debut, as it’s based around three dreams and three nightmares, imagining himself a spider, a plastic bag or a pilot fish in three of the long, whimsical flights of fancy. Elsewhere, two insects use a shared love of Le Corbusier’s architecture to flirt, or we visit a hot spring with the yakuza. 

There’s a touch of Eddie Izzard to the surrealism, but more ponderous and deliberate in the telling. In his quietly commanding, mesmerising, delivery, every intonation and pause has been painstakingly planned. Occasionally, he’ll break the spell, jump-cutting to bark out some Chinese Communist propaganda or berate the audience, breaking the spell to get a shock laugh.

Otherwise, his crowd work is typically idiosyncratic. ‘May I approach?’ he politely asks a front-row punter before sharing a fascinating fact. He impishly backs another into a corner, daring him to do something wildly inappropriate and playing with the awkwardness that causes, showing off his understated command of the room.

Occasionally Li serves up something that might look like a traditional stand-up bit ‘isn’t it ick when men hold fish in their dating profile pictures?’ but it’s subverted into a reverie about what might really be going on.

Other vignettes are inspired by his real life, serving as a Singaporean military conscript or working in the canteen at St Andrew’s University, fantasising about a forbidden romance with an older, racist co-worker

The pace is often a little slow, but you need to submit to the curious journey he’s taking you on, which is easy to do. Li proves he can do proper gag-gags with some silly wordplay up top, but prefers these ambles of the mind, staking out a quietly quirky way of doing comedy that is his, and his alone.

Review date: 5 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard