Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Lance Mao has lived in the UK for two decades but appears destined to be defined as an immigrant. The Chinese comic arrived in this country via Hungary and alludes to a perilous journey from his birthplace. 

But wherever he's been in Europe, his ethnicity has made him a target for the kind of knuckleheads who conflate South-East Asian features with martial arts prowess. Compounding this, his violence-trained father castigated him for his weakness in not fighting back.

Rooted in this testing adolescence, Mao has developed a cocktail of mental health issues, OCD, anxiety and depression, with the intrusive thoughts of the former manifesting themselves in the voice of Peppa Pig.

This surely has to be a conceit, but Mao never acknowledges it as such. From his destabilising introduction in which he delivers a stream of Chinese, punctuated with sporadic instances of English, featuring Peppa and a cast of notables from Epstein Island, he cuts an alienated, unsmiling figure. He's impatient and surly with latecomers and anyone who doesn't fully engage with his crowd work.

Suggesting he's never had a happy day in his life, before instantly retracting the statement, he's certainly got a bleak sense of his own absurdity. He recounts how his counsellor's advice for him to embrace minimalism, lest his OCD be exacerbated by material goods, left him without the consolation of even the most basic possessions and links to his family.

Yet through the tense moments, a playful side just about breaks through his deadpan. Musing on the Chinese habit of adopting anglicised names to integrate, the motivation behind his own is only the most laughably quotidian amidst his friends. And through a chequered employment history, he permits his Peppa alter-ego plenty of leash, allowing her to share conspiracy theories, suicide ideation and a drug smuggling operation in Hollywood.

Mao's best routine casually insinuates why he's the best candidate to be the maths tutor of a privileged young boy, not because of his ability per se and certainly not due to his sunny demeanour, but because of a rare, positive spin on racial profiling. Delivered lightly, without satirical grandstanding, it's a solid observational bit. Yet his Peppa aspect then hilariously elevates it into a Talented Mr Ripley-style saga of him inveigling his way deeper and deeper into the family.

A dark, demented flight of fantasy, it all stemmed from one of his pupils nastily putting him in his place. And sometimes, there's a true ‘revenge of the nerd’ edge to his more barbed, scabrous lines, linking the global rise of China, really starting to flex its muscles on the world stage, with Western weakness for its mass-produced goods, a softening up that might well be our downfall.

Climaxing in a bizarre musical number, featuring Peppa merged with one of literature's best-known outcasts, The Pig with the Dragon Tattoo is rarely an easy listen. So many lines feel like a cry for help, as Mao relates how his OCD has left him isolated and living in fear.

Yet with his thoughts warped from watching too many children's cartoons, his safe space, his brain's creation of this weirdly unhinged porcine alter-ego appears a survival tactic, as his unfettered imagination forges connections with the audience almost in spite of himself.

If he could more explicitly offload all of the bleakness onto Peppa and be less prickly as 'himself', Mao would have a much more accessible act and perhaps feel less alienated.

Review date: 22 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Hoots @ Apex