Marie Faustin: Sorry I’m Late review – an irresistible hour from a stellar standup

Has Marie Faustin blundered? Support acts are supposed to be warmup funny, not red-hot funny. Faustin’s NYC pal Sydnee Washington is red hot here, and 10 minutes in, one wonders whether Faustin might play second fiddle at her own show. It’s a measure of her ability, and confidence, that Faustin raises the comic temperature still further after Washington’s set, with a thoroughly irresistible hour on ageing, gossip and relationships v “situationships”. She makes a stellar impression: it’s hard to imagine a personality more obviously – infectiously, gloriously – cut out for standup comedy.

Does that mean she has a coherent show? Not really, but no one minds. Are all her jokes well worked? Certainly not. Several anecdotes (the one about triggering a bomb scare at a bus station; the one about auditioning for a Maybelline ad) fizzle out where one might expect a climax. But when the journey’s as much fun as this, who cares about the destination? Faustin takes enormous pleasure in her stories, animating them with self-ridiculous swagger, sassy stylings and phraseology, and the most contagious mwa-hah-hah laugh in comedy.

“There is no greater business than somebody else’s business,” she tells us, revelling in some scuttlebutt overheard in a taxi. Her show, Sorry I’m Late, assumes we feel the same, and shares the experience of being Marie Faustin as if we’re as hooked on hot gossip as she is. These 60 minutes celebrate the absurdity of her present moment: now almost unimaginably old (she’s in her 30s), social status fluid (she recently went skiing), and yet stubbornly single.

Singledom is the subject of a live dating show she hosts in Brooklyn, and the prompt here for a droll routine about her romcom fantasies v the reality of a recent coup de foudre gone wrong. Her relationship chats with the front row feel less like mechanical crowd-work than excitable chatter between friends. Other choice routines share Faustin’s vain millennial take on Snow White – no sympathy here for that trash-talking mirror – and a Black reimagining of the kidnap vengeance movie Taken. By the end, the idea seems absurd that Faustin might play second fiddle to anyone.