Fest Best: Foreign imports

Omid Djalili

A proper palladium-filler these days, Omid Djalili’s expansive tally of TV, film and standup credentials forgives his Fringe show this year; ostensibly a comedic blackboard for his forthcoming UK tour. Running through a broad range of international accents, the ebullient Iranian doesn’t just scrape the surface of our prejudices, but gouges them out gloriously; an irrepressibly likable nature lightening what would be controversy in another comedian’s hands to mere cheekiness in his.

 

Naz Osmanoglu

Naz Osmanoglu’s tightly-strung yarns stretch out well beyond any reasonable word-count limit. Packing his standup with surreal storytelling, the “half English poshboy, half Turkish warlord” mines the comedic possibilities of his Mediterranean heritage with accounts of the malignant hyper-masculinity entrenched in him by his father (which also seems to explain the show’s outsized title). Behold the awesome.

 

Tobias Persson

Tobias Perrson’s delicate Scandinavian enunciation reveals a polite foreigner’s awe at our bawdy ways, glorifying all that is gritty about Britain, while possessing an impressive knowledge of its more impenetrable regional accents. Not that his motherland gets off lightly, mind, as Perrson muses over his tragic lack of an iPhone in a country of techno-nerds, or his failure to breach Stockholm’s supposed free love culture. [Catherine Sylvain]