2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Urooj Ashfaq: How to Be a Baddie review – the edgiest One Direction fanfic on the fringe
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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