Leila Navabi underwent a baptism of fire in comedy when, aged only 21, her Radio Wales gag about Rishi Sunak “looking like Prince Charles in brownface” triggered a media storm. No fun being hauled across the redtops, and – while owning the joke here, and seeking (with graphics) to prove it – Navabi felt badly advised at the time, then hung out to dry. Why the expectation that she, a political innocent, supply the channel with Sunak-based satire? Because she is brown?
Navabi’s fringe debut Composition isn’t the first show I’ve seen this August that protests the burden of representation weighing on comics with (in her case) “multiple minority identities”. It’s not always the most consistently argued, either. But it speaks eloquently to our liberating-and-confining identity-politics moment, and to the added pressures on performers of colour at the Edinburgh fringe.
Now 23, Navabi handles those pressures with grace here, her set a winning if conventional “this is me” calling card, tracing her route from Welsh schooldays via online videos to faltering first steps in comedy. She recalls her surprise at first realising she wasn’t white, and her ongoing ambivalence about self-definition (“I identify largely as an imp”). She dramatises her burgeoning queer consciousness with a lovely song about having her ears pierced, oh so erotically, at Claire’s Accessories. Then come the years of teen confusion and isolation when, from her bedroom cocoon, a rap number about potatoes goes viral.
She performs that track here, and another about equestrians’ relationship with their horses – both enjoyable, both exampling the kind of (blithe, playful) comic she’d like to be if race and identity could be easily set aside. Her argument on why, for her, they can’t could use developing. But Composition remains an eye-catching introduction to a comic of promise, an innocent imp scarred by entry into the real, hostile world.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August
