Review: Josh Makinda is Probably Fine

A freewheeling hour with a constant disassembling of anything approaching a routine

★★★

comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes

By Jay Richardson

Published 12 Aug 2024

Fest magazine

With roots in Australia, Kenya and New York, a father to a child and dyslexic apparently, you still never get to the bottom of who Josh Makinda is in his Fringe debut, such is his freewheeling reliance on improvisation and constant disassembling of anything approaching a routine. His initial forays into crowd work furnish him with plenty of ideas to play with. But after a while it becomes apparent that this is almost the entirety of the show, a haphazard affair, as he weaves blurted thoughts about Bill Cosby and glory holes through good-natured enquiries about occupations and relationship statuses. Any conversational cul-de-sacs are simply closed off with the suggestion that he's on meth or with him shaking a fist at a vengeful God.

The few pre-prepared bits he does have fall into two categories. The first feature an initial, compelling suggestion of racism that he may or may not have experienced, mitigated by there being factors that are not clear-cut, yet which on both occasions he suggests he resolved with excessive violence. If it's a tad weird and disturbing that he does this twice, it's still not as bad as the account of his first kiss, built up and built up to almost zero payoff, and the inexplicable championing of a rubbish microwave recipe book with which he opt to close. Given that he's an arresting if unpredictable act in the moment, Makinda should almost certainly stick to the off-the-cuff flights of fantasy rather than such leaden routines.