Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
The 2023 best newcomer winner rebuts her ‘mild’ reputation with choice quips and boyband erotica
O
n 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.
