On her first visit to the fringe, Urooj Ashfaq left as the surprise winner of the best newcomer award. Now she returns, to rebut a descriptor widely applied to that 2023 debut – specifically, that her comedy is mild and lacks edge. You want edge, she asks in How to Be a Baddie? I’ll give you edge! And so the show does, to a degree – if not a degree high enough to cancel out the 29-year-old’s unshakeable amiability and charm.
In part, she explains, the confusion was a cultural one: back home in India, there’s nothing conservative (to use one of her critics’ mots injustes) about Ashfaq. She’s a standup, for a start, in a country where that attracts not, ahem, intelligent reviews like this one, but vigilante attention and online insults. Ashfaq has a choice quip in response to one such, and another explaining why she’s off-putting to both Hindu and Muslim men.
The promised combative material on religion does not then materialise; she reads the audience’s horoscopes instead. (One off-colour response prompts a deft running joke about how Ashfaq’s crowd-work is malfunctioning tonight.) More on-message with the bad-girl theme is the standout section on erotica. What starts as autobiographical standup about the books that fuelled Ashfaq’s sexual awakening leads to a recital of some One Direction fan fiction, Indian-style, in which our simpering heroine has been sold into slavery to the X Factor stars.
Memories stir of Sofie Hagen’s whole show about her teenage Westlife fanfic. But the Mumbai native brings a style all of her own to this literary epic, which includes Zayn Malik with an Arabic accent and jokes about Indian tweens’ murderous feelings towards their would-be mothers-in-law.
The later sections don’t re-ascend to these comic heights. A section on defending her sister’s honour at school might feel edgier to those who better comprehend its repeated Hindi term, randi – akin to whore or slut. A closer on Ashfaq’s recent surgery for haemorrhoids wrings less juice than you’d expect out of one of those perfect-for-comedy bodily indignities. You may not leave convinced of Ashfaq’s delinquency, but she certainly proves that 2023’s success was no flash in the pan.
• At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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