Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Darren Leo: Good Engrish
Darren Leo
Genre: Comedy, Stand-Up, Storytelling
Venue: WU Asia Pacific
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
In Good Engrish, comedian Darren Leo blends heartfelt storytelling with provocative stand-up to chart his family’s journey from a comfortable life in Taiwan to starting over in Canada. The show moves between vivid scenes of cultural displacement and sharp observations on race, language, and identity. A promising work-in-progress that invites audiences to laugh, think, and connect with the immigrant experience.
Review
Tucked away in the upstairs bar of the four-month-old WU Asia Pacific, with the hum of its restaurant below, up-and-coming Taiwanese-Canadian comic Darren Leo offers his work-in-progress hour Good Engrish.
The show blends two modes: Leo’s personal storytelling and his stand-up comedy. The story follows how his family went from a comfortable life in Taiwan (what he calls “emergency-row-on-the-plane rich”) to losing everything and moving to Canada when Leo was sixteen. In Taiwan, his mother was a teacher at his school, his seat-mate was the president’s daughter, and his grandfather was a soldier. But when his father’s new invention, color-changing mugs, turned out not to be dishwasher safe, the family’s finances collapsed. Within weeks, they had sold everything, including some of his mother’s sentimental heirlooms, and were on a plane to Canada.
Once they arrived, Leo faced the challenges of being a fish out of water: racially different from most of the people around him, not yet fluent in English, and forced to adapt to an entirely new culture. These story segments are where he’s at his most compelling. His pacing and detailed descriptions build empathy and a strong sense of place, giving the audience the feeling of a young man navigating cultural displacement with warmth, honesty, and a knack for character building and vivid scene-setting.
Leo frequently uses act-outs, showing this isn’t just a guy with a mic- he’s also considering the visual story in addition to the auditory, something missed by many stand-ups. There’s room for more precision in those movements; at this stage of the work, they show the piece is moving in the right direction.
The stand-up portions focus on observations about race, language, and culture. They often lean into risky territory: jokes about stereotypes, politics, and identity that he can get away with in part because of his own Asian heritage (Leo punches up and across, never down). The jokes are sharp in their observations and, on the night I was there, landed well with the audience, but they also create a noticeable tonal shift from the tenderness of the storytelling, resulting in two different personas delivering the work.
Deeper integration of those personas would result in a more cohesive piece, adding layers to his stage character that he could play with to create even more humor. At one point, he began to do this: after a round of crowdwork where he took some sharp jabs, he then apologized to the audience members he’d made fun of. In that moment, both personas were truly alive in Leo.
Another angle could be to mine more of the humor already embedded in his family’s journey, including moments of absurdity, resilience, and cultural clash, rather than often steering toward riskier, more provocative jokes. The stand-up doesn’t need to disappear; some of his edgier observations are genuinely insightful. But keeping more of the humor inside the narrative would make for a smoother, more unified arc.
The show has an easy charm, and Leo’s likability means the audience is with him even when the tonal gear shifts are abrupt. He’s only a few years into his stand-up career, and it’s an impressive hour given how new he is to the scene- so much so that I had the sense this is someone really going somewhere. If he can integrate the two sides of his stage persona and shape a bigger payoff for the ending, Good Engrish could grow into something truly memorable.
With as many labels as FringeReview offers, it’s still hard to choose the perfect one. While much of this show is working, there are still areas where it could further develop. So, in the spirit of his Taiwanese schoolteacher mom, I will give him a push. I recommend Good Engrish for the boldness of its attempt to weave together rich storytelling with risky stand-up, and for its invitation to the audience to deeply understand the immigrant experience.
