Simon Brodkin

“I tick boxes as a comic,” says Paul Sinha, the gay Asian stand-up who also happens to be a public school-educated GP. But while this 36-year-old Londoner talks turkey about his own split identity — gay but not camp, outspoken on stage but slow to speak his mind in real life — his second Fringe show fuses private woes with broader questions of race and identity.

How did Britain get so dumb, he asks, jumping from tales of performing to students Googling their way through their degrees, to talking about the capricious way that crime gets reported. Most murders are ignored, he says, unless the victim was a pretty young white girl (“this one’s particularly tragic — you’d have f***ed her”) or a promising young black student.

There are many Edinburgh comics addressing religion and multiculturalism. But Sinha is one of the most effective because of the way he uses his personal circumstances to suggest that, actually, 99 per cent of us can find a way to act decently.

It’s just how we respond to the other 1 per cent that’s the problem — which is why Sinha’s attempts to get out of his comfort zone have such a satisfying resonance, as he quotes Edward Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

He could do with including his audience more — perhaps telling rooms full of strangers about being a gay football fan who lusts after rough men has led to a strident delivery that leaves few gaps for dissent. But this is a deeply considered, deeply felt show. Oh, and funny too.

Simon Brodkin, a fringe first-timer, is also a practising doctor with an identity problem. But in his case he’s a character comic presenting four creations — and, less interestingly, an arch commentary as himself during his costume changes.

He has an acute eye and ear for larger-than-life personalities. There’s the taciturn holiday rep for Third Choice holidays, grimly offering his coach party an enormous amount of fun. There’s the breezy trustafarian (“I don’t even see colour . . . in my eyes everyone’s white”) and the geezerish new dad Lee. By the time he browns up to play an Indian hospital doctor, you’ll just about take it from him.

Like Sinha, he could do with a bit more of the audience interaction that, so far, only the football-shirted Lee delivers. But if he finds the right focus for his prodigious talent, Brodkin could well become a household name.

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