Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You review – a clown strides into the mainstream with style

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh The comedian delivers a tour of his peripatetic childhood, with stops for risque gags and to ponder his resemblance to a ‘porn Super Mario’ Comedy fans have seen Sami Abu Wardeh in several guises, from a capering clown catching cherry tomatoes in his mouth, to teller ( on last year’s fringe ) of the historical stories behind the Gaza crisis.

But we’ve never seen him deliver straight autobiographical standup – until now.

The new direction, the 40-year-old tells us, is thanks to his agent, who’s told him that audiences need to get to know him better.

And who may be concerned, Wardeh implies, by recent dust-ups between this “anti-fascist”/pro-Palestine performer and one or two audience members to whom that worldview was unwelcome.

Sami Abu Wardeh Hates You (its title notwithstanding) presents us with a more palatable act, one effortlessly capable of delivering mainstream comedy.

From the opening gag about walk-on music, to the tour of his peripatetic childhood (from Kuwait via southwest London to Dubai), to the risque gags about wanking and his resemblance to a “porn Super Mario”, the show might have been designed to demonstrate the Irish-Palestinian’s mastery of standup topics and techniques.

But he gives them his own spin; whether that’s workshopping racist slurs with his bully, or orchestrating his Middle Eastern schoolmates in a rap-along to Will Smith’s Men in Black.

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