A likeable character with an easy San Francisco drawl, Sid Singh is an American comedian who has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for five years now. This year’s show is a natural crowd pleaser, with enough laughs to keep you entertained throughout.
A perfectly enjoyable set that had the halls of Dropkick Murphy’s ringing with laughter on a rainy afternoon.
Singh opens his set with a selection of rules: the gist of these is to ensure the room is relaxed and ready to not take themselves too seriously, a good idea when potentially flammable topics such as racism at school and sexism in the gym are floating on the horizon.
This gig is described as a collection of “best bits”: well-timed jokes are woven into slowly-escalating stories, with Singh the butt of each joke as always. There’s no doubt he is a gifted storyteller: layer upon layer of one outrageous event after another is expertly built up to keep the room poised in anticipation, and the punchline is almost always a pay-off for the giggles you have along the way.
Outside of these stories, frequent pauses risk disrupting the easy flow of the set: it’s not always clear whether this is a man in control of his thoughts or simply lost for words, but I’m inclined to believe the former. Singh doesn’t disguise his awareness of how closely he fits the high school cliché: references to bullying in his American college come thick and fast, and are shrugged off in an easy casualness that makes the audience comfortable to join in with his laughter.
Some of the material towards the end of the set starts to lose its potency, particularly with an overuse of crude language, but remember the rules: this is a show that doesn’t take itself seriously, and neither should you. A Singh In The North! is a perfectly enjoyable set that had the halls of Dropkick Murphy’s ringing with laughter on a rainy afternoon.
