Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

With the giving of offence and the threat of cancellation now an annual peril for comedians at the Fringe, it's intriguing to hear the growing ranks of Indian stand-ups at the festival talking about the subject, wit the censorship and anti-democratic policies of their government ensuring that they're at a sharper end of the issue than most.

Yet who could be outraged by Rahul Subramanian, a boyishly good-looking, blandly inoffensive, anecdotal act who steers well clear of politics and religion? DJs, that's who. Having mocked the record spinners, Subramanian was subject to a death threat and had a comedy festival appearance cancelled after a posse of them turned up at a show to beat him up.

Related with incredulity at the egos he punctured, it's part of Subramanian's wry, head-shaking shtick that he's barely in control of his own destiny, often ascribing events to God's will, albeit without convincing you of any great piety on his part.

Certainly, the chaos of the Fringe doesn't faze a debutant used to the madness of Mumbai. And he cheerfully dismisses such quaint British customs as a hard shoulder on the motorway, accustomed as he is to the suffocating gridlock back home, where driving is not so much a case of following a highway code as squeezing into spaces that defy the laws of physics, which he reproduces on stage with smiling physicality.

Such proximity precludes politeness. And he lands a quick dig about the rapacious acquisition policies of the British Museum, not the most original observation but hard to refute all the same. He's got a message for the racists of this country, too. It isn't one that the laziest or most Luddite bigot will want to hear. But then the juggernaut of India's booming electronics industry wouldn't notice any British competition anyway.

And that's about as spiky as Subramanian gets, trading in sweeping generalisations and humblebragging rather a lot. When he gives a blow-by-blow account of how he came to secure his original coding engineer job, failing upwards alongside thousands upon thousands of his contemporaries, the sheer economics of scale and India's powerhouse place in the sector portrays his ascent as a breeze and inevitable.

He might belittle the middle-management class who've grown too old to understand their own products, much less supervise the graduates blatantly passing off existing intellectual property as their own. Yet the chief target of Subramanian's mockery is himself, a corporate drone who suddenly wakes up and decides he needs more from life but has no idea what his passions are. In his existential angst, at least, he's unsparing and very funny.

Alighting upon comedy as a hobby, he soon lucked out in securing a private gig for patrons so wealthy that they had no idea how much they were paying him. Selling the evening to his sceptical wife as a lucrative one, and neglecting to mention the Russian bellydancers also performing, Subramanian really plays up the nudge-nudge innuendo at the expense of 'er indoors. After he imbibed copious amounts of alcohol to steady his nerves, the gig appeared set for disaster. But fate, if not even divine intervention, saved him once again.

Subramanian's online haters accuse him of playing fast and loose with facts, as if that's ever been an inhibition for a stand-up. Especially one as in command of his own mythology as him.

But I struggled with the performative misogyny of his tale about preventing his wife from benefitting from his will, a truly regressive routine. Yet it went down an absolute storm in the room, as virtually his entire set did. 

I'm happy to admit to a certain amount of cultural ignorance of his references. But in terms of reflecting relations between the sexes, Subramanian appears to me to be ploughing a very unambitious, old-fashioned path indeed.

Review date: 22 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Assembly George Square