Hoots @ Hilton
Until August 31
(21:30)
If comedy be the food of love, then 150% Masala’s nightly rotating cast of South Asian stand-ups is ghar ka khana for the soul. Hoots @ Hilton have managed to create one of the most welcoming basement venues I’ve encountered: cosy but not cramped, genda phool adorning the blacked-out backdrop as a large, lively & diverse audience settles into chattering over the seriously funky bhangra filling the room.
There are groups of families, US tourists, numerous South Asian couples & a smattering of British holidaymakers. It’s a broad collection of people to play to. Thankfully, tonight’s cast covers an equally broad range of styles, tones & themes, while our MC for the evening, Sorabh Dhir, immediately manifests the playful, mildly anarchic vibe of the room.
Dhir is a masterful MC. He’s straight into the crowd work and, over the course of the hour, manages to engage with almost everyone in the audience—some repeatedly, and to increasing comic effect. His gentle enthusiasm, beaming smile & infectious laughter gradually pull the room into the gravitational orbit of his banter.
This allows him to segue into an opening five breaking down the great South Asian rivalries between India, Pakistan & Bangladesh—and, of course, Punjabis & Gujaratis. The latter provides consistent laughs throughout the evening as the solitary ‘Gujju’ in the audience & Dhir banter back and forth, with distinct An Englishman, a Scotsman, a Welshman & an Irishman walk into a bar… vibes.
As all the best MCs do, by the time he introduces our first act proper, Dhir has transformed the audience into a veritable Newton’s Cradle of kinetic energy. We unaffectedly whoop as Hasan Al-Habib enters stage right.
Al-Habib’s experience shows, & he squeezes an incredible number of laughs from the audience during his tight ten minutes. He has easy confidence by the bucketload, spending only a cursory amount of time explaining his Iraqi/Brummie heritage before launching into the first of many disarmingly on-point impersonations.
Posh Edinburghers, Teesside fans, Aussies & Brummies all get the treatment, as does his French-Iranian girlfriend, with whom he has a unique competitiveness over whose country of heritage fared worse at the hands of the US. He essentially delivers a string of very funny mini-anecdotes, wrings a belly laugh from the audience with something as simple as a spoonerism, & plays lightly and cleverly with language and accents.
His pacing is that of a seasoned pro. Al-Habib is appearing in two other shows this year & I’d strongly recommend checking him out. He has confidence, charisma, immense likeability & material that’s broad enough to travel while remaining distinctively his own.
A guaranteed winner.Next up is Alingon Mitra. Hailing from New York, with Indian heritage, his is an act I can easily imagine going down well in a Manhattan comedy club. Heavy on the anti-US self-deprecation & ‘I’m a liberal’ angle, he tells tales of New York house-sharing, accidental catfishing & the trials of possessing long hair, an androgynous body shape & a moustache. Along the way he delivers a couple of neat little pieces of cultural trope-twisting.
Then comes Tarang Hardikar, and the second ‘must-see’ of the night.
He saunters onto the stage, goofily lanky in a geekish shirt and wearing an overly trusting grin, then begins haltingly delivering his material. Initially, nobody is quite sure what to make of him. A few good-natured, supportive chuckles ripple around the crowd.
I smell a rope-a-dope.
Over the next eight minutes Hardikar gradually unravels his act for us in captivating fashion. Think Mark Silcox meets Father Dougal in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. His facial expressions are hypnotically captivating and, between these & his neat, faux-incompetent wordplay, he eases us towards the unlikely main topic of his segment: Maths.
What follows is five minutes of some of the most delightful, surreal & strangely beautiful material I’ve seen in years. Hardikar plays the un-self-aware, cavorting Fool to a tee, allowing him to slip in material that’s profound & absurd in equal measure.His physical capering—including the first genuinely original joke I’ve heard about how dogs greet one another—adds the finishing touch to a deceptively assured performance. This is another not-to-be-missed performer to catch while you can.
We wrap up the night with Raj Poojara, a man apparently accustomed to being described as ‘Moana’s mate’ or ‘Indian Hagrid’. Unsurprisingly, he has quite the stage presence.
Poojara delivers a closing ten minutes of broad, well-received self-deprecating stand-up centred around not being married, not going to the gym & quite possibly being ‘the milkman’s son’. He eventually uses all this to deliver a neat bilingual punchline to finish the night—which feels perfectly à propos.
All in all, this is as entertaining an hour of comedy as I’ve experienced at a Fringe showcase. The blend of comedic spices might not be quite as numerous as those found in a garam masala, but there’s certainly enough variety here to provide the spice of your Fringe life.
Ewan Law
