The biggest story in advance of Brighton's comedy festival was local comic Stephen Grant establishing in court his right to joke at his former wife's expense. This new-found impunity can only have encouraged Shappi Khorsandi, whose Moon on a Stick show discusses her recent divorce and socks it to her former husband. He'll shrug it off – Khorsandi's barbs, like her standup in general, are non-stick. She's too concerned with being nice to do damage.
It's unapologetically meat-and-potatoes standup - or kebab-and-flatbread, given Khorsandi's frequent allusions to her Iranian heritage. Her short set is essentially a chat about what's happened to Shappi recently, blurted out by a woman who, she claims, can't stop self-disclosing. The jokes can be unadventurous: the British Citizenship Test for Dummies is easy prey, although the inappropriateness of the phrase "the less said about the weather, the better" as advice to UK immigrants is well observed. And some just don't work: her husband boning up for in-law visits by reading guidebooks to Iran is not "just like me turning up at his parents' house [in Nottingham] dressed as Robin Hood".
Khorsandi has a weak spot for that glib brand of joke-making. Her set is more effective when real feelings interpose between set-up and punchline. She's eloquent on the upheaval of motherhood, and on her anxieties about life as a single mum of one son. ("A girlfriend? But you're only 56.") Her flair for turning standup into an intimate chat is also impressive – even if a sequence in which she selects a mate from the crowd is inconsequential filler. Her divorce clearly rankles, but there are signs Khorsandi is finding comic strength in adversity.
