Review: Paul Sinha: One Sinha Lifetime

"Welcome to my biggest ever selling Fringe show," deadpans Paul Sinha, star of ITV's The Chase, international quizzer and, today, consummate comedian. While it's always obvious that Sinha is the smartest guy in the room, seeing him off the screen and onstage is a welcome reminder that, for the past two decades, he's often been the funniest, too. Over the past few years, he's also acquired a new and substantially bigger audience. And it's exactly what he deserves.

In 2019, he also received a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, a fact which understandably features in this year's show. As the superb title suggests, there's a retrospective, memoir feel about One Sinha Lifetime. But what for some comics might be an opportunity to mainline on pathos in a cynical attempt to tearjerk their way to an award, that's absolutely not where Sinha pitches this. As ever, he's just plain cynical, taking beautifully aimed, and inarguable sideswipes at a slew of historical slights, and recounting his own scrapes as an incorrigibly smart and invariably right child, teenager and adult. This is life not as poetry, but as a list of facts relayed by a man with nothing to prove. Except that he can write the best jokes.

That devil-may-care attitude extends to his performance. Sinha, clearly, no longer feels the need to change a stand-up style which has suited his writing well for years. You could call his style distinctive: a faux solemn set-up, followed by a thudding piece of misdirection. Bait, switch; bait, switch ad infinitum. In truth, though, the sharpness of his writing shows up the lack of variety in his performance. He often trips over carefully written passages which does them no justice. And he really, really, is bad at singing and playing the piano. Not that this "insufferable little prick" would care. It's still funny.