What a title: in a world where comedy shows can have borderline meaningless conceits attached to them, ‘The Good Place’ writer Demi Adejuyigbe’s debut Fringe show offers us the pure promise of at least one honest piece of entertainment. WouId I pay to see a trained acrobat do a single backflip? No. Would I pay to see an untrained comedian do one? I think I would!
The flip is both heavily teased and cleverly not made overly central to what is essentially an hour of imaginative, multimedia0-enhanced sketch comedy masquerading as a confessional solo show.
In brief, Adejuyigbe wants to impress his ‘crush’ by doing said backflip, but she’s not here yet: she’s at a celebrity party he wasn’t invited to. And so he’s going to give us a presentation that runs the gamut from a parody of songs that parody ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ to an invitation for a member of the audience to punch him in the stomach. It’s all very DIY but it’s also slickly entertaining – I wouldn’t say it’s exactly apolitical but I would say that you can absolutely see why the man was hired to work on a quirky but populist multi Emmy-nominated comedy smash.
As for the backflip - well, I’m not going to spoiler what happens exactly, but it manages to be both an allegory for artistic vulnerability and forging ahead against the odds… and a really intentionally stupid momen. You’ll see more self-consciously important comedy shows this Fringe, but few more out and out fun.