Hari Sriskantha @ Laughing Horse, Counting House
It's a much happier day for spending an hour with Hari Sriskantha
An alumnus of the Edinburgh Revue, Hari Sriskantha brings his first full-length solo show to the Fringe with a spring in his step. Sriskantha aims to teach us about happiness, the things that keep us back from it and how we can get closer to it. Freshly married, Sriskantha was recently faced with the prospect of having the Happiest Day Of His Life ruined by his own mind, but managed to turn it around. A few nerdy asides add an extra flavour to an hour of stand-up where storytelling stands front and centre.
Acknowledging how clever his audience is, Sriskantha takes us through an imagined story of a cave-woman searching for her own happiness, and goes back and forth over his own material to fact-check and re-arrange. His treatment of racial topics is simply hilarious and passed off with a shrug, and he is acutely aware of how the changing political landscape affects which jokes he can and can’t tell.
Touching on the political, the surreal and the structure of his own jokes, Sriskantha avoids getting too philosophical by bringing us back down to earth again with puns and simple observations of the world.
Hari Sriskantha: Clown Atlas, Laughing Horse at The Counting House (Lounge) until 27 Aug (not 14), 4.45pm, free