Comedy fans have seen Sami Abu Wardeh in several guises, from a capering clown catching cherry tomatoes in his mouth, to teller (on last year’s fringe) of the historical stories behind the Gaza crisis. But we’ve never seen him deliver straight autobiographical standup – until now. The new direction, the 40-year-old tells us, is thanks to his agent, who’s told him that audiences need to get to know him better. And who may be concerned, Wardeh implies, by recent dust-ups between this “anti-fascist”/pro-Palestine performer and one or two audience members to whom that worldview was unwelcome.
Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You (its title notwithstanding) presents us with a more palatable act, one effortlessly capable of delivering mainstream comedy. From the opening gag about walk-on music, to the tour of his peripatetic childhood (from Kuwait via southwest London to Dubai), to the risque gags about wanking and his resemblance to a “porn Super Mario”, the show might have been designed to demonstrate the Irish-Palestinian’s mastery of standup topics and techniques. But he gives them his own spin; whether that’s workshopping racist slurs with his bully, or orchestrating his Middle Eastern schoolmates in a rap-along to Will Smith’s Men in Black.
All of this is greatly embellished by our host’s clowning skills, which ensure that most of those routines are far more than just chat. Body, vocals and gurning, leering face are all bent towards caricature here, as Wardeh brings to larger-than-life the demonic-seeming rituals of the Catholic church, say, or the sex appeal of his Arabic teacher. An anecdote about voicing an audiobook platforms his accent abilities, forever teasing at the boundaries of the permissible.
You wait in vain for the show’s premise – “a chaotic exploration of the value of hate today” – to be fulfilled, but the subject is addressed just briefly. Only the later stages bring us into the present day, with a story about a comically ineffective protest he launched against racist policing. We get a veiled picture of who Sami Abu Wardeh is now, but a vivid and funny one of who he was while getting here.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August
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