Review: Jin Hao Li: Swimming in a Submarine

To start with a niggle, there’s moments in Jin Hao Li’s debut that feel just a little too cute. Like someone has swallowed the dictionary and grammar book of comedy, and is spitting it back out at us just a little too slickly. Perfectly structured around three nightmare/dream pairings, this hour brings together a repertoire of skills and techniques with a deftness that feels scarcely believable from a guy who was a Chortle student comedian finalist in just 2022. There’s something unreal – maybe even uncanny – about the whole performance. And “performance” is just the word, as Li ensures that each word and gesture has metaphorical quotation marks around it. But here’s the thing: it really is quite some performance.

Chinese-born, Singapore-raised and Scottish-educated, Li is able to read back to us the dictionary of comedy he’s ingested, while pointing and laughing at the artifice of it all. Through the medium of an ethereal, savant-like cod philosopher he delivers surreal stories with off-kilter connections, one liners out of nowhere, goofy act outs (two insects flirt over their love of Le Corbusier), deliciously awkward audience interaction and a rap about apples. Each beat is perfectly measured. And then, for just a moment, he snaps: “The West is not free thinking!” he shouts; the tropes and forms of theatre he’s forced to inhabit are “vile”. This is at once a shiny simulation of what comedy looks like, and a surreal mirror held up to an art form we love to claim is subversive. Either way, it’s hard to turn away from.