Ayo Adenekan’s ascent has been swift. Last year, the rookie comic cracked a joke on stage about Doctor Who’s Ncuti Gatwa. This year, he scripted jokes for Gatwa, as a writer on Sky’s Saturday Night Live UK. In this second fringe set, the Edinburgh man shows why TV producers spirited him away after last year’s debut: his perspective is fresh, he writes a deft joke, and he has the warmth to win over a room. But he’s not the finished article. He could vary the pace, which tends to the sonorous. Several of his ideas go underdeveloped. And the story Homeland Insecurity tells is unremarkable.
It’s a love story, Adenekan tells us at the start, about a summer romance splashed across the canvas of the Edinburgh fringe. A meaningful but fly-by-night fling, it provides the backbone for an hour in which the 24-year-old ranges across his relationship with his dad, his “straight white man friends”, and his outrage when a namesake comedian comes up from London to steal his thunder at last year’s festival. “I’m not concerned about the boats, man. Stop the trains!” There’s a running visual gag too about product placement, which could be something, but Adenekan never really commits to the bit.
That’s not the only instance where the material might benefit from one more draft: see the routine about his discomfort with dating black men. Elsewhere, I wanted Adenekan to give the delivery a bit more welly. Instead, he repeats and circles back on himself: the more times he tells us (and there were several) that he’s delighted to be back in this venue after last year’s success, the more I found my own delight diminishing.
But no doubt Adenekan has the raw materials to fashion something distinctive, with his under-exposed angle on life (Gatwa notwithstanding) as a queer Scottish-African, his smooth and mischievous manner, and the ability to drop choice lines including (of his Nigerian diaspora family) “we’re Muslim like Meghan Markle is black”. Even if his summer romance story finally feels generic, there’s enough here to suggest others will soon be queueing up to give Adenekan the love.
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At CabVol @ Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 30 August
