Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Dave Ahdoot – Ethnically Ambiguous
Dave Ahdoot
Genre: Comedy, Solo Show, Storytelling
Venue: Bothy - Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
This is effectively a TED talk with lots of good laughs – it lifts the lid on a world that not many have direct experience of and is held together by a big, warm personality.
Review
In the Bothy at the Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, Dave Ahdoot sets his audience a challenge – “Guess which of these nationalities people have identified me with?”. There’s a bunch of flags of different countries on a projection – he points to Spain, Greece, Japan, commenting in the appropriate language. He acknowledges that he’s never been mistaken for Japanese but hopes we’re impressed he can speak it. He is actually an Iranian Jew – which he says is difficult right now, but if we want a refund it’s too late – the show has started and the doors are locked.
You get the tone immediately – laid back, wry, smart as whip – and eminently likeable. Although the show follows a storytelling format there’s still plenty of room for banter with the house and self-deprecating asides.
Ahdoot is here to tell us about his career as an actor – in television commercials (“you Brits call them adverts”) in the USA. It all begins with a YouTube video that he makes with a friend, inviting women on a double date – it goes viral and an agent persuades him that he has a future in tv. His superpower is that he is ethnically ambiguous, so he can play many parts. Initially squeezed in on the edge of frame, or completely covered in a haz-mat suit, he is building his way to leading roles – no longer a commercial anonymity – but a featured and therefore legitimate actor.
There are ups and downs and moral dilemnas. He’s booked for a well-known burger brand but he has to eat pork – and he’s kosher. He balances upsetting the rabbi – nicely photoshopped in – with the fact that he’s working – so it should be ok.
Eventually his ship comes in, in the shape of an insurance company commercial – working with a face known across the USA – “Flo”. (We learn that just as he’s about to shoot it, his fiancée of 4 years breaks up with him and he has to play through the heartbreak in his role as a happy, fully-insured family man)
Using a remote control to operate a projector from his laptop, we see clips of his work, along with home-made photoshopped images and memes and Ahdoot draws us into the sometimes murky and conflicted world of advertising, where he is a convenient one-stop-shop to tick ethnicity boxes. He explores this through his various experiences – he’s not particularly concerned about being exploited – it’s that kind of gig – but he hopes that he’ll get booked because he’s funny – just like people said he was in the original YouTube video. We recognise the shallowness of that world but we also celebrate his victories – getting cast – all the while enjoying his laconic style.
Ahdoot has crafted a neat show with some interesting and slightly deeper thoughts to take away. Director Casey Jost has ensured the pace doesn’t slacken (although the focus could be sharpened with a little more stillness) and that there is a satisfying arc to the show. This is effectively a TED talk with lots of good laughs – it lifts the lid on a world that not many have direct experience of and is held together by a big, warm personality. It’s a very enjoyable hour or so of entertainment – and there’s nothing wrong with that.
