Ah, the sweet smell of success. Paul Sinha was one of the breakthroughs at last year’s Fringe. Playing in a 50-seat prefab cabin, he was shortlisted for the if.comedy award for a show that looked at race and identity with a sharp, self-deprecating wit.

This year, his reward is . . . a slightly bigger prefab cabin. But this show, King of the World, is a step on for Sinha as a performer all the same. Last time, he had first-class material that he delivered as if the audience were a potentially mutinous mob to be subdued with the force of his oratory. This year, the material doesn’t cohere quite as well, but Hurricane Sinha has become a refreshing breeze.

Sinha is the outsider’s outsider, a privately educated gay Asian doctor turned stand-up. At school he was a fact hound and a chess champ. “Not geeky enough to get bullied,” he insists, “just geeky enough to get ignored.” But this is not one of those shows in a which a comedian shows off his dorky genius in the guise of berating it. Sinha revolves his diatribe around two moments at which he felt like a hero. First there was the TV quiz triumph, aged 20. Then, more recently, the group holiday to Las Vegas where he won at roulette, copped off with a gay Republican who told him he sounded like Simon Cowell, and fleetingly felt at one with his boozy, bolshy friends.

“Why the relentless navel gazing?” he asks, finally. Questions of mortality are looming. Happiness, he suggests, means stepping outside of your comfort zone, celebrating your luck as well as owning up to your blunders.

This diffuse but always entertaining show doesn’t quite earn its carpe-diem conclusion. Sinha hasn’t tied the personal to the political as satisfyingly as he did last year. But what is worth celebrating is his superb comic writing. Apparently dense information is invariably ammunition for a satisfyingly surprising comic payoff. His turns of phrase are pointed and precise. He’s not yet the king of the comedy world. But, no question, Sinha is here to stay.

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