Anil Desai: Stand Up Chameleon

There are 52 playing cards, with 52 celebrity faces, all to be impersonated in 52 minutes. Anil Desai certainly has a job on his hands – yet the self-taught impressionist triumphs in his latest show.

It isn’t everyday that you come across a comedian as shamelessly self-mocking as Desai, who enters the stage in a tacky snakeskin jacket, boogieing preposterously to the Pulp Fiction theme tune. But it's Desai's alter egos that the crowd have come to see, and he duly responds with an endearing attempt at a Michael Jackson dance routine from his earliest creation, Rajesh the Bollywood lounge singer.

The climax of the show comes when Desai asks the audience to choose the setting, with the result a massage parlour in Nazi Berlin. The suggestion paves the way for a surreal scene with Yoda as a Jewish masseuse ("I sense Nazis. This way they come"), while Homer Simpson storms the parlour performing the Hitler salute. Desai cannot help but smirk at the bizarre twists the show takes, as he veers between personalities ranging from Captain Jack Sparrow to Tom Cruise, adding a twist by letting the audience decide the strange situations to put them in for the evening.

"I would never have guessed", sneers a lone killjoy, when Desai reveals the subject impersonated in another successful scene. "Well, I'm a chameleon," replies the unfazed comedian, flickering his tongue. Such confidence is not misplaced.