Daniel Simonsen

Simonsen has supported Simon Amstell on tour, and they share a similarly pessimistic, fretful world view.  ‘It’s just really difficult to be a human being, you know?’ he says at one point in his Norwegian accent, the tiny cracks in his English working well with his position as slightly alien to normal people.

His humiliation often comes from screwing up the smallest things in life, such as saying hello, goodbye or even his own name. You might wonder how he even functions, yet tacitly understand the panic that led him into these extreme situations.

Other times, the embarrassment is heaped upon him, as he describes the indignity of flyering for a dentist while dressed as a giant tooth or the awkwardness of being confronted by a naked, pre-pubescent cousin that plunges the audience into territory as uncomfortable as Simonsen’s entire life seems to be.

This is all set around some vague story about a search for his father that took him to Chile and back to Norway, which might once have formed a structural spine to the show, but is now largely abandoned, remnant clinging messily on to the ungimmicky observational comedy that he convincingly delivers.

Despite all this, he doesn’t quite have the killer routines to make the show soar into the truly memorable, and there are a couple of mid-show lulls. But he demonstrates both an assuredness and a distinctiveness of voice that sets high expectations for the future.