Urooj Ashfaq: How to Be a Baddie review – the edgiest One Direction fanfic on the fringe

Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
The 2023 best newcomer winner rebuts her ‘mild’ reputation with choice quips and boyband erotica

On her first visit to the fringe, Urooj Ashfaq left as the surprise winner of the best newcomer award. Now she returns, to rebut a descriptor widely applied to that 2023 debut – specifically, that her comedy is mild and lacks edge. You want edge, she asks in How to Be a Baddie? I’ll give you edge! And so the show does, to a degree – if not a degree high enough to cancel out the 29-year-old’s unshakeable amiability and charm.

In part, she explains, the confusion was a cultural one: back home in India, there’s nothing conservative (to use one of her critics’ mots injustes) about Ashfaq. She’s a standup, for a start, in a country where that attracts not, ahem, intelligent reviews like this one, but vigilante attention and online insults. Ashfaq has a choice quip in response to one such, and another explaining why she’s off-putting to both Hindu and Muslim men.