The fashion is for fringe newcomers to deliver solo shows all about themselves: potted autobiographies big on identity and self-assertion. By the end of Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s debut, by contrast, we haven’t the faintest idea who he is. Amusements is performed in character as “an old-school entertainment type”, as he’s described it. The voice of chuckling, patrician mid-century American entertainment. The joke, which you’ll spend the show both amused by and trying to pin down, explores the gap between the supposed authority of that stately, avuncular persona and the frictionless superficiality of its every utterance.
It’s a confidence trick of a show: anti-comedy concealing itself in a tuxedo and the voice of JFK. “Just another of my signature jokes there,” Ufomadu will twinkle, “with a little sprinkling of humour on top.” But the joke is often how thin the jokes are (“don’t waste your 20s being between the ages of 20 and 29”), and how far between: Ufomadu enunciates every word like Orson Welles chewing Japanese whisky.
But it’s hypnotically unusual, and fun, too, to engage in Ike’s game of cat-and-mouse. What’s he getting at, as he tells us how he too used to be an audience member, as he sings the alphabet à la Bing Crosby, or orates the opening page of Melville’s Moby-Dick? It’s hard not to reflect on the politics of a black man inhabiting this slick persona from an era when America imagined itself white. Ufomadu makes a point of not going there: any reference to real-world concerns – his upbringing against a backdrop of Reaganism and the cold war, say – is swiftly repressed beneath whatever nonsense song or gibberish Shakespeare recital that immediately follows.
The downside of Ufomadu’s courtly delivery is a low jokes-per-minute ratio. And perhaps he leans a little heavily on the patience-testing comedy of doing something unfunny until it starts being funny. But I was happy to be along for the ride with an act that – in stark contravention of newcomer protocol – won’t come to you, but is so ticklesome and intriguing that you can’t help but come to him.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August
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