One type of stand-up comedy that I like a lot is the kind that just sounds like a conversation. When someone is up onstage talking and it sounds the same as when they are just chatting to you in a bar of cafe. Except funnier of course. It might be tightly scripted but for me the best comics are the ones that can make a tightly scripted set sound as if it is a magical stream of consciousness.
Ronnie Neville (Just The Tonic, Nucleus) is not like that. I’m not going to give him a star rating because his show might have been stories he tells in the pub but on this occasion they should have stayed in the pub. His show barely felt like a stand-up gig and not in a good way. Neville is an Irishman who has spent time working in Australia and his set was just a series of stories about his misadventures along the way. Some involving family, some involving kangaroo testicles, some involving both. Maybe he has something, he was certainly unique, but he really needs pointing in the right direction performance-wise.
He could learn a lesson or three from Ian Stone (Counting House, four stars, picture above by Elliot Minogue Stone), who is a master of the relaxed stand-up comedy gig. Though never so relaxed that he is flat on his back. Stone has been doing stand-up almost as long as I have been going to stand up and from the moment he walks onstage and smiles you know that you are in safe hands. As the title suggests, his new show Keeping It Together is about trying to stay sane in a mad world.
He is self-mocking and sharp and never misses a trick, whether confronting getting old, imagining David Attenborough commentating on a riotous football match or reflecting on his father who seems to have had such an eventful life I’m surprised he hasn’t done a show all about him. Or maybe he has. Apparently when Ken Stone fancied a day off work at the sorting office he didn’t phone in sick, he phoned in a bomb hoax so the building had to be evacuated. Now Ronnie, that’s a funny story. As is this corker from Stone:
“As a surprise on their honeymoon, my dad took my mother to a Bournemouth against Brentford football match in the fourth division. I can’t believe she stayed with him for twenty years. Actually, I can’t believe she stayed with him for the second half”.
I’d been hearing very good things about Milo Edwards, albeit mainly from his publicist, but hey, a jobs a job. So I finally caught up with him at the Monkey Barrel (sorry if that sounds as if I’ve been chasing him all over Edinburgh recently). I saw Edwards a few years ago when he told an illuminating tale of living in Russia. In the middle of that Fringe his father died, but he finished his run because his father had been adamant that that’s what he should do.
Since then Edwards has also lost his mother, so has become an orphan, although, as he explains in his enjoyable show, his elderly grandmother is still around so life has come full circle. She looked after him when he was young and she is looking after him again.
Edwards’ show, How Revolting! Sorry to Offend (three stars, picture below by Joshua Perot ) is undeniably funny, but there was something about it that jarred. Maybe it was because I’d seen him do more of a story-based set last time I wasn’t quite convinced by him as a full-blown stand-up comedian. It felt a little like a performance, as if he had studied the best stand-ups at stand-up school and was trying to emulate them, getting angry about subjects ranging from skiing to the Falklands War.
His observations about the complexities of class and politics and life in general were keen – he’s an Essex man but Cambridge-educated rather than The Only Way is Essex Man – but the references, property shows, reality TV – were a little obvious, as if selected from a tick list of things that get a Pavlovian laugh. He went down very well and maybe if you hadn’t seen Edwards before this might not have been an issue, but for me he hit all the right beats and yet didn’t click.
I felt similarly conflicted about Ali Woods (Underbelly, three stars), one of many comedians whose online clips have helped him to build up an audience. His latest show At The Moment really is the ultimate show of two halves. The first half was bread-and-potatoes generic stand-up apart from an intriguing personal detail about how he had a delayed puberty which meant he had some catching up to do thanks to a shot of testosterone from the doctor.
But there was something about Woods’ style that just felt forced. Whether it was the physicality or the little act outs or the differences in tone it just wasn’t working for me. Having watched clips his online persona somehow felt more real. It is great when comedians have put a lot of effort and energy into their stage performance but somehow I wasn’t feeling the vibe.
Towards the end though when he got onto the subject of his relationship break-up things took a turn in the right direction. The show felt heartfelt and moving and - well, maybe he’s a very good actor – but this felt like the genuine Woods onstage and not someone doing a Dead Ringers impression of a high energy stand-up comedian. He needs to bottle this part of the act and somehow channel that feeling into a full show in future.
Alexandra Haddow (Monkey Barrel, four stars, pictured above by Rebecca Need-Menear) is another comic who has gone from storytelling to straight stand-up this year, but I felt in this case it was a good fit. Last time Haddow told the story of her affair with an older, married man, this time, in Third Party, she was more, topical, more political. There were gags about the government – which required a quick rewrite after the snap election – gags about the impossibility of buying a house, gags about taking drugs for the first time and living like a twenty something in her mid-thirties.
There was also a nice rant about en suite bathrooms - they might sound classy but it basically means you can hear your lover doing a pooh. You even got a card at the end with advice, a “checklist for the new world” which made me chuckle and included her mantra: “Stay Angry, Stay Hopeful, Stay Horny.”
There was nothing earthshakingly original here, but it all dovetailed neatly together and felt authentic. Even the story about trying to spice up her sex life with her partner by going to a sex party. Things may have been embellished for comic effect but not to the extent that we didn’t buy into it. A highlight was a yarn about going to take MDMA in a house which was anything but the seedy drug den she might have expected in the past. Maybe it wasn’t entirely true but it certainly rang true to me. And perhaps that’s the secret of great stand-up. If you are good enough to fake it convincingly maybe it doesn’t need to be true.
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The Edinburgh Fringe runs until August 26. Tickets and details for all shows here though to be honest I find the Fringe website a bit clunky, but maybe that’s just me. Stick with it or just google the name of the act you are interested in plus the word “edfringe” and you should go straight to their page.