Not all comedy shows need weighty themes or moments of bare-all vulnerability just before curtain-fall. Demi Adejuyigbe pretends to have the latter, but I wasn’t fooled. Which made a change: this American act (also a writer on US sitcom The Good Place) is a master of the rug-pull, constructing one usually daft reality only to subvert it before you’ve found your footing, often for a dafter reality beneath.
This he accomplishes with an array of resources at his disposal (PowerPoint, musical theatre, audience interaction, a robot sidekick) in a show that purportedly builds to the party piece promised in its title: Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip.
Will he? Won’t he? There’s the show’s ticklish suspense for you – alongside the wait to see if Demi’s crush, who the backflip aspires to impress, will show up to see it. (She’s been waylaid at a celeb party to which our host was not invited.) In the meantime, let the 32-year-old guide you through his five-part system, with audio-visuals, on – what, exactly? If there’s a point to this excuse for one batty set-piece after another, it’s gone right out of my mind. But no matter. The sketches (a joke-within-a-joke meta-parody of We Didn’t Start the Fire; a proposal for a new brand of racism) don’t just stand alone, but frequently backflip themselves. (The sketch duo BriTANick, no slouches at the rug-pull themselves, direct.)
The show is just great fun, in short: the fun that comes when irreverence piles on incongruity piles uon restless invention. There’s always another surprise around the corner in Adejuyigbe’s hour, be it the fatherly phone-call he receives from an ex-president, or the hijacking of his show by a loose-cannon computer companion. Or the by-the-by reveal mid-musical number about “the Ikea Monkey”, or what happens when our host embarks on the practical element of his jazz tutorial. A belated reckoning with the essential frivolousness (evasiveness, arguably) of these proceedings felt unnecessary to me. When a show is this ingenious and light of heart, there should be no requirement to atone for it.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August, then at Soho theatre, London, 27-31 August
