Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Indian comedian Tarang Hardikar is a chronic overthinker with uniquely silly logic that he applies to everyday situations with a forensic rigour. 

His autistic brain applies a meticulous, unbending rationality to everyday turns of phrase that most people wouldn’t give a second thought to. He gives them that second thought, then a third and a fourth, probably well into double figures.  

It means there are plenty of original, quirky ideas in his show, although there are shortcomings, too – habits which would pass unnoticed in a short set but are exposed in the longer format. 

Prime among them is the way he overuses the trick of acting out both sides of a conversation to expose the flawed rationale of an idiom. It does the job, but when applied to every situation becomes irritatingly repetitive.   

He’s proud of the way he nests routines within routines, suddenly pulling back to remind the audience where everything started – such as an inner monologue in a therapy session - long after we’d forgotten it. He will have led us a long way down a winding path by the point he springs back to the start, generating a laugh by disrupting his train of thought so abruptly.

Some of the ideas bear returning to, such as his take on the evolution of maths from simple counting to imaginary numbers, although, again, that conversational to-and-fro is overworked. 

And, as a show, If I'm Not Wrong gets too bogged down in complications it doesn’t need. The literal through line about him talking about how he can’t draw a straight line – with illustrations – adds nothing but a convoluted payoff of nonsensical but smart-sounding analysis. That’s not the only time when his cleverness aims to baffle as much as amuse, overwhelming the original joke.

But those gags are, indeed, original ‘what’s the deal with?’ observations on quirks of English and the wider world that few if any will have spotted before. As an up-and-comer, he’s in need of a director to arrange these thoughts better, but they are worth hearing.

• Tarang Hardikar: If I'm Not Wrong will be at the Pleasance Courtyard during the Edinburgh Fringe.

Review date: 19 Apr 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival