Aditi Mittal @ Underbelly, Med Quad
Aditi Mittal is a breath of fresh air
In a festival full of hysteria and fragile egos, she’s cheerful. Aditi Mittal is relaxed and utterly assured – in fact, she’s so relaxed, she performs in her trackies. Nothing knocks her, not even the wet seagull that fell through her skylight at 6am (good morning Leith). But then, why wouldn’t she be? In a country of 1.3 billion, she’s one of only 20 English speaking women making her living as a stand up comedian. That takes some guts.
It also means a unique perspective, on both the country she’s from, and the ones she’s visited. She specialises in the ludicrousness of the everyday, and some of her best pieces are about the culture shock she’s experienced in Europe and America. She also has some cracking one-liners which crop up throughout, whether talking about Bollywood, malaria or temple carvings. And yet another neat trick she has is talking about base material in such a fact-of-life way it doesn’t even ping the outrage sensor – in another comic's hands that would be the punchline; in Mittal’s it’s just the route to the joke. In fact, there’s a whole lot more going on there than first appearances might suggest. This is a fun and novel show.