Comedy review: Paul Sinha

Published on Friday 28 August 2009 14:33

PAUL SINHA: 39 YEARS OF SOLITUDE **** THE STAND COMEDY CLUB III & IV (VENUE 12)

PAUL Sinha is a cleverer and more pedantic comic than most, a quiz fanatic who currently ranks 60th in the UK in some geek scale and pub sub-culture most of us are probably only passingly aware of. Yet he's also desperately single, his first and only proper relationship having ended in 1991.

He ticks all the boxes of a gay, British Asian doctor for the media, but he's not entirely comfortable in any of these roles and stands a man apart.

Where this show triumphs is that Sinha relates his series of chance episodes, linked by happy and occasional literal accidents, as only progressing from one to the next when he finds the courage of the uncowed nitpicker standing up to the ill-informed, loutish and aggressive with hard and often obscure facts.

Far from killing him, his solitude has made him stronger. There's a life lesson here – or perhaps the sleights of rhetoric of an exceptionally skilled stand-up – when he persuades you that all those lonely hours spent researching on the internet have more appeal than compromising over which movie to see with a loved one.

Of course, the show is not as dry as that sounds and, through his instinctive self-deprecation and railing against imbecility, Sinha has some truly wonderful moments, consistently topping his emotionally honest anecdotes with mischievous, throwaway gags and twists.

Moreover, he's a fine judge of mood, puncturing any lingering feelings of worthiness or excessive sympathy with a gleefully nasty and disproportionate closing tale of revenge. Unlike the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel from which he adapts his show title, this may not be Sinha's magnum opus, but the masterwork is surely not far off.

Until tomorrow. Today 9:25pm.