Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

A year after winning an International Emmy for Best Comedy Series for his Netflix special, Landing, Vir Das is more determined than ever to make people think.

If you just want to laugh, ‘"get someone to tickle you, you basic bitch', he jokes. Those words might sound harsh written down, but they’re necessary. The laughs, however, are constant in this provocative and outstanding hour.

Das is an accomplished comic and Bollywood star whose level of fame in India is off the scale. And he’s been censured in ways that would force an average person to shrink into obscurity. 

A British audience might not fully appreciate just how radical his material is; we’re lucky enough to take freedom of speech for granted, after all. But he’s been called a traitor and ‘anti-national’ for criticising the Indian government, he’s had a barrage of death threats, and he’s been so affected by it all that even his ‘trauma has a childhood’.

In this exhilarating show, he covers several hot topics, among them the spectrum of racism. He’s learning mixed martial arts for a movie role, but isn’t comfortable that the dummy he’s given to practice on is black. And, in Australia, he experiences such overt OG racism in the flesh that it’s almost as thrilling as seeing the Northern Lights.

We also get some crazy stories about being stopped by a New Delhi cop while on acid on the back of a motorbike, and he describes the unusual deployment of soup he was taught while working exhausting hours in a US kitchen to keep life and soul together before finding success.

He’s got some interesting observations about the way Gen Z categorise themselves, how we’ve been sold templatised and generic beauty standards, and how one particularly famous toxic man would simply break if a woman kissed him on the forehead.

And we’re treated to a bizarre story about him having to explain joke structure to a Mumbai police officer in order to defend some of his material. There’s so much in this fast and masterfully structured show that you might want to go back to reabsorb everything.

Vir Das is so sharp, so funny, and such a brave and important voice. Taylor Swift could save Gaza with a single tweet, he says, but celebrities are expected to be silent. He won’t, though – even if he sometimes has to use the Marvel Universe as a metaphor for post-2019 India. 
 

Review date: 24 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Ashley Davies
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome