Jin Hao Li: Swimming in a Submarine review – soothing meets unsettling in fringe comedy debut

Jin Hao Li: Swimming in a Submarine review – soothing meets unsettling in fringe comedy debut

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The standup weaves real-world experiences of racism with whimsy about angler fish and joining the yakuza

There are few things more tedious, they say, than listening to the contents of someone else’s dreams. Jin Hao Li seems to have taken that as a challenge. His rookie fringe set is structured around a trio of nightmares he had, and some happier reveries too. And even when dreams aren’t the subject of Swimming in a Submarine, there’s a certain dream logic at play – or at least, we’re lulled into thinking so by the China-born Li’s gentle cadences and fuzzy, offbeat humour.

This is an arresting debut then, staking out space where soft surrealism meets the autobiographical standup of a man who went from the Singaporean army to an English degree at St Andrews uni. He traces that trajectory here, but in the telling, it routes him via a romance between an insect and an arachnid, a rap from the perspective of an apple, and the loss of his capacity to pronounce the letter Z. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that a man taught by the military that “your gun is your wife!” should find it natural to flit between the everyday and the bizarre.

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