August 18, 2026 at Pleasance Courtyard, Above
Li Jin Hao: like if someone looked at Johnny White Really-Really and said, “Not quite whimsical enough.”
Li’s debut hour, Swimming a Submarine (now on YouTube for free), was a big success for an up-and-coming comedian, and something like that is always a tough act to follow, the ordeal of living up to initial promise. He took two years for the follow-up, to really get it right, and Falling From a Moon passes that ordeal with flying colours. Many colours, flying beautifully on the stage. By which I mean this show had a lot of lighting cues, perfectly set up to enhance the material.
Falling From a Moon is structured carefully, even the parts that seem like spare whimsical tangents come back around. He flips between past and present, between reality and fantasy, between soft and intense, between sweet and suddenly confrontational (yet even in those moments, still, somehow, also sweet). Swimming in a Submarine saw Li Jin Hao occasionally play with the way he can turn his soft-spoken whimsy into sudden bursts of energy; Falling From a Moon more fully opens the possibilities in this, as he makes the switch more often, and seemingly more spontaneously. He’s more playful in this hour, more loose despite every routine being perfectly planned and fitting together.
Parts of this show are genuinely touching, ruminating on the nature of nostalgia and finding the right words to capture ethereal emotional states. But it’s just as much a show about the impossibility of capturing the ethereal, and how sometimes that’s okay, maybe even good.
Li’s persona is incredibly endearing, essentially asking the audience to like him, as he carries us toward understand his experience. There’s the longing that comes from homesickness, an emotional aspect of the immigrant experience – but “immigrant experience” is both too broad a term for what he discusses, because it’s so specific to him; and too narrow a term, because it’s so human and relatable to anyone who’s ever left anything behind, which is everyone.
Li Jin Hao can draw laughs from the most surprising spots, the sudden and unexpected puns or running across the stage or silly act-outs. In a world where observational comedians have seemingly already covered every tiny absurdity of life, Li unearths new ones, finding confusion in simple aspects that were just sitting there in plain sight, but they turn to gold in his hands. If I’m waxing poetic too much in trying to describe Li Jin Hao’s comedy, that’s because I’m trying to show how it feels to be in his audience. He slips so easily, almost imperceptibly, between comedically empty parodies of poetry, and genuine poetry. And sometimes it can look like the former but turn into the latter, or vice-versa.
You can close your eyes in this show, let the images and ideas wash over you, and it’s lovely. Though I don’t recommend doing that for too long, because you’ll miss the plot-relevant lighting changes and Li’s entertaining gestures and movements. However you like to experience it, I highly recommend you attend Falling From a Moon, if you possibly can.
Dave Baillie