Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Last year, Bill O’Neill vowed to slip on 1,000 banana peels in his Edinburgh show. This year, fellow US comic Demi Adejuyigbe  promises a  quicker stunt – a single backflip – to both impress his crush and so that ‘people will finally know my power!’

Of course, it won’t take a full hour, so there’s plenty of anticipatory build-up and diversions to fill the time, a series of vignettes to which he’s given the acronym AFLIP! A is ‘analyse the present’, F is ‘flaunt your knowledge’, and so on. The exclamation mark is the backflip itself, obviously,

What follows is a joyous collection of daft sketches, deliciously crappy PowerPoint presentations, subversive comedy songs, unpredictable audience interactions, an introduction to jazz and unlikely guest stars via phone and in person. Each skit is entirely disconnected from the next but also manages to occupy the same absurd world Adejuyigbe  has built around himself. 

It’s an hour of endless creativity, always unpredictable. Adejuyigbo’s forever pulling the rug from under the audience, upending their expectations as well as the supposed rules of comedy itself. There are roars of laughter for every creative misdirection as the crowd collectively realise they’ve been had, impressed at how skilfully he did it

The comic’s fully aware of his own ridiculousness, even when purporting to deny it. ‘What an original concept!’ he boasts when he unveils a plan for a parody version of We Didn’t Start The Fire, but with 2024 references. Then he only bloody goes and makes an entirely novel skit from that tired premise

Like the work that’s propelled him to online success, huge ambition and craftsmanship has gone into making something so dumb as this show, with the similarly inventive sketch duo BriTANicK directing the shenanigans.

It’s only 98 per cent frivolous, however. Adejuyigbe succumbs to the Fringe convention of tagging a message on the end – surprising as that is, given the apparently random concoction of the hour. But the coda, delivered with the help of Barack Obama, does provide context and a bit of weight to the excellent nonsense. 

Then Adejuyigbe  is back to the stupidly futile as the build-up to his stunt crescendos. Appropriately enough, you’ll end up head-over-heels about this distinctive comedy talent.

Review date: 6 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard