Brighton Fringe comedy review

As a former Cambridge Footlighter and graduate of the Philippe Gaulier clown school, Sameera Bhalotra Bowers comes with an impeccable comedy background.

But diplomas are not everything, as her one-woman show acknowledges, parodying academics as being so ingrained in their own arcane worlds they fail to see the bigger, real-world picture.

Thus a practical geographer and a ruthlessly analytical economist debate the optimum location for a hotel along a beach, generating a plethora of meaningless PowerPoint graphs and diagrams to make their point. If you’re craving comedy about the Egan Wheel – a genuine tool for assessing sustainable communities – Bowers has you covered.

Academia already has its own joke shorthand to mock the impractical assumptions scientists make to simplify their modelling – ‘spherical cows in a vacuum’ – and Bowers grabs that idea and runs with it, taking it to be a genuine suggestion.

It’s part of a wider theme here of people from various walks of life being imprisoned by institutionalised thinking and insular lingua franca – all very clearly rooted in her  experience of being a recent graduate.

That’s to the fore in her opening sketch satirising nonsensical corporate jargon, which was apparently inspired by her own interview for a job with EY, who were seeking ‘value-driven impact leaders’. 

Later we get a convoluted lecture on intersectionality from a corporate HR drone reducing all the humanity of people’s complex real experience to a nonsensical mathematical formula.

Of course, to offer her bitterly absurd parody of such things, Bowers’ own language must be verbose and obfuscatory – an entertaining trick, but one she overplays, coming dangerously close to the irritation of the jargon-spouters and illustrating her scenes with just a few too many nonsensical slides.

She also has a mechanical delivery, adhering tightly to a fixed, deliberate cadence, which puts her at a distance. Sometimes these patterns come with simple rhymes at the end of lines, just in case any illusion of spontaneity was remaining.  

A more traditional caricature is Crystal, a VIP love life-mentor - with her mystifying language being that of New Agey psychobollocks, occasionally pausing after some airy-fairy observation to invite us to ‘let that sink in’. (Though  I can’t unsee Elon Musk whenever she does that). This is a more relaxed performance, as befitting the floaty hippy persona, and lets Bowers show off a more physical element to her comedy.

Mixing things up further the show also features hand puppetry, to depict her dad and uncle discussing the wisdom of frittering away life savings on a guitar pedal; some trippy lipsynching;  a snooty character proud of their position as the second most respected person in town; and some cheesy use of AI as Bowers wonders if a solution to her housing woe might just be to move into an old folks’ home, despite being just 22. 

There is a certain earnestness to being that age, and the show sometimes feels a little too pleased with its cleverness. ‘Stop trying to be meaningful,’ an externalised inner critic cries at one point, and that’s a fair point. Especially so at the end, when she clumsily slaps on a message about appreciating your family while they’re still around that seems to have little to do with the preceding hour.

Setting out her stall as she transitions out of student comedy and into the mainstream, What Is Going On? sets Bowers up as a bold performer with plenty of good, quirky ideas, even if the execution is flawed. While the show would benefit from a looser performance and a tighter script, it nonetheless serves as an effective calling card from a comic we will surely see plenty more of.

Review date: 11 May 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett