America's indie comedy scene has supplied some great fringe acts recently, including Perrier-winner Demetri Martin and Flight of the Conchords' Kristen Schaal. Kumail Nanjiani cut his teeth on the same circuit and, if he isn't as idiosyncratic as those performers, he's just as impressive. Content-wise, there is little distinctive about a set that draws but doesn't depend on Nanjiani's dual Pakistani-American identity. What marks him out is how he maximises the return from workaday raw material, parlaying a beta male personality and a keen eye for the ridiculous into big laughs.
Having arrived a week later than scheduled, there's a sense Nanjiani is threading together the set as he performs it. Anecdotes overlap from his life in the US and from his Karachi childhood ("I don't know if you guys know Pakistan. But we fuckin' remember you guys"). This cultural cocktail unites a routine about Nanjiani's confused pubescence, taught that lust was a sin equal to stabbing the Prophet's nephew, with a skit about the inadequacy of Harry Potter's education. He looks back on his exotic upbringing – he went to a birthday party whose star attraction was a lethal fight between a cobra and a mongoose – with a pampered American's dismay.
At the centre of all these jokes is the comic himself: bemused, cowardly and adept at involving us in each situation's absurdity. We buy into the extended routine about an intruder in his attic, at the end of which Nanjiani pops his head gingerly into the roof-space, dreading a fatal blow. The terrifying decrepitude of a Coney Island fairground ride is nailed hilariously by his observation that it pre-dates that index of venerability, sliced bread. I won't claim that Nanjiani's the best thing since, but he's very good.
