Using a single word to sum up a performer can be a dangerously reductive game, but one keeps popping up when watching Zainab Johnson: raconteur. Granted, it’s a curiously old-fashioned word for a zeitgeisty performer whose set primarily covers all the big millennial preoccupations: buying her first home, dating on the apps, cute fluffy animals, and owning a gun (as a black Muslim woman she is not the DEI they had in mind apparently, but it is easier to get a gun than a husband). 

Yet raconteur is the best word to describe her laid-back, conversationally intimate style which once again proves that the right story, told well, can transcend any cultural boundary. Most of an Edinburgh-based audience won’t be troubling the gun store any time soon, but so convincing is her schtick that we’re soon nodding along and seriously considering the relative safety values of gun ownership vs leaving an empty pair of men’s boots in the porch for lone women in houses. She’d be dangerous in telesales. 

The final 20 minutes is impossible to describe without spoilers; let’s just say the pay-off is a glorious ‘fuck you’ to comedy gender norms that elicits a genuine roar of joy from an audience she’s held in the palm of her hand from the off. There’s no such thing as an overnight success in this business, but there’s a real sense that Johnson’s about to catch a very big wave. 

Zainab Johnson: Toxically Optimistic, Pleasance Courtyard, until 24 August, 6.40pm; main picture: Matt Misisco.