Naz Osmanoglu: Ottoman Without An Empire

39658 original

If Naz Osmanoglu became a comedian to work through some impressively peculiar disentitlement/daddy issues, then he picked perhaps the only course of action worse for the wallet than shitloads of therapy. The Turkish-English 26 year-old’s loss is our gain: as he sweats, shouts, gesticulates wildly and generally works himself up into a right old state, it feels less like watching standup than it does witnessing a man in the throes of some kind of comic emotional exorcism.

Osmanoglu is—and we’re not making this up, it’s on Wikipedia and everything—19^th in line to Turkey’s former Ottoman throne. A birth rite that’s about as useful as the mega-afro shaped exotic blue hat he wears at the show’s beginning.

Then there’s the matter of the man from whose loins he and his pointless entitlement sprung. The grumpy, bitter, confrontational Osmanoglu Snr looms over this show like a black cloud, and his boy mines their complex, strained relationship for laughs with, at times, hilariously brutal honesty—peaking with a description of the time they got into a kind of Mexican-standoff after the young prince inserted toy cars into the VCR as a kid.

Osmanoglu’s more common observational material—about troglodyte PhD students and jobsworth gremlins in fluorescent jackets—is good, but we can get that kind of stuff from countless other standups at the Fringe. You’re a thwarted Turkish royal fathered by a guy upon whom it sounds like entire therapy textbooks could be based, need we remind you Naz. Get deeper into that and you’ll be a king in our eyes.