Amrik Virk looks like a laugh to be with. He has a non-threatening face, and a switched-on and conscientious manner - as young men go. Gosh, he even has a sweet smile. Leaving the steampunk cavern of Maggie’s Chamber at Three Sisters, if you’ve not split your soul to make horcruxes, you’ll find it tricky looking into his deep eyes and refusing him a donation for his Free Fringe performance. I gave him £2 because he made me laugh twice. The thing is, despite the handsome and lovely charisma-bomb that he is, Virk does not seem to have settled on a style yet. His 50-minute set lurches in scattershot fashion, grasping at what might be funny, but never holding onto anything long enough to wring a fair set of laughs from the audience. He jumps from item to item almost scared that each one might sink, trusting every lump of material for two minutes maximum before leaping to the next. Were his routine Jimmy Carr’s quick one-liners or Milton Jones’ brief, stark surrealities, this might not be a problem for Virk.Instead he mainly vacillates between stereotype up-ending, comedy of the self, and observations. His grapple with stereotypes has a good foundation, but he doesn’t do enough to challenge them. He doesn’t have a comedic persona or enough strange foibles to play on for personal comedy and his observations are hit-and-miss as far as originality goes. The show’s funniest bit, in fact, comes when he railroads over some audience participation and abuses his position of power on stage. And this is Virk’s strength and perhaps his future success. His charm and youth give him an enviable capacity to take the audience with him. Despite his weaknesses, at no point did show-goers turn on him; conversely, we were willing him on, willing him to succeed. It’s his first Fringe. Should Virk ever learn to harness this, focus his routine to play on it and push those corners of darkness, he could be funny and dangerously so. Especially with that bonny smile of his.
