Tag: TheGuardian

The 29-year-old Bostonian followed a string of racist tweets all the way to a white nationalist meeting – and turned the experience into his new Edinburgh show

The 29-year-old Bostonian comic Alex Edelman (“I’m from a really racist part of Boston called Boston”) resembles a caricature of a manic, wiseacre standup: eyes on stalks, voice pinballing between squeaky incredulity and basso profondo disdain, a pliable face combining Graduate-era Dustin Hoffman with Anne Hathaway at her most electrified.

But his new show, Just for Us, is anything but cartoonish. His previous work has touched on troubling experiences, such as performing for an antisemitic audience in Estonia, and he has no compunction about cracking near-the-knuckle gags: in one routine about attending summer camp, he referred to it as “the good kind of Jewish camp. The icebreakers at the other kind are way less fun.”

Edelman met Donald Trump years ago at an event in New York. ‘I thought: “This guy is the biggest piece of garbage”’

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Laughing Horse @ the Counting House, Edinburgh
The comic discusses race, mental health and mortality in a set that’s packed with difficult material

Ahir Shah made his name – and secured a 2017 Edinburgh comedy award nomination – with polemical standup about the disintegrating state of the world. This year’s set, Duffer, tries something different. It’s about his grandmother, who was deported from the UK – and from Shah’s family home – when he was five, and whom he met for the first time in 22 years on a recent trip to Gujarat. It’s a show with lots to recommend it, even if Shah’s style probably lends itself better to political than emotional comedy.

There is a political dimension to Duffer, mind you: Shah uses his gran’s enforced exile from Britain to make strident points about immigration policy. But mainly this is a personal set, about his ethnicity – there’s a gleeful opening routine about British Indians’ secret success (“Jews are taking a lot of our heat!”) – his struggles with depression, and the tug on this atheist millennial of his ancestral religion.

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Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
Sense and subtlety are in short supply in this hour-long dive into the award-winning comic’s ‘wackadoo’ psyche

Inspired lunacy or meaningless drivel? In nonsense comedy, they’re separated by a thin line. With Sam Campbell’s show The Trough, we’re in the realm of Harry Hill or Sam Simmons, where non sequitur follows prop gag follows wildly arbitrary behaviour, all in aggressive defiance of good sense. For me, this falls short of the best absurdism: there’s no subtext, nor implication that his “complete case of the wackadoos” is a displacement activity for anything else. Neither does Campbell – like Hans Teeuwen, say – bring quite the level of skill and commitment that makes complete meaninglessness fly.

All that said, The Trough – which after Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette in 2017 won the Barry award at the Melbourne comedy festival – is a reliably amusing way to spend midnight hour on the fringe. From its opening video, using Kevin Spacey’s face to express Campbell’s dismay at observational comedy, it cocks a manic snook at convention. Our host’s neurotic energy, frequent bolts off stage to collect daft costumes and props, and unexpected interruptions from the crowd generate considerable instability as Campbell compares throat lozenges to gemstones and compels us to bow down before pictures of monkeys. So too does the animated sequence when he blows the brains out of his enemies (one of them, alas, is me).

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Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
This pin-sharp satire on self-love doesn’t aspire to comedy so much as ‘connect’ with its audience, yet positively gleams with surprises and smart impro

‘I’m gonna go.” The first words of American comic Kate Berlant’s Edinburgh debut sets the tone. She has entered the stage, read the room – and tonight, it just doesn’t feel right, so “I’m gonna go”. Spoiler alert: she doesn’t – and thank goodness, because what follows is a pin-sharp satire on self-love and self-care, millennial-style. It’s effectively character-comedy, but Berlant is brave, or devious, enough to pretend the character is her.

To what extent she has a prepared set, or whether she’s making it up on the hoof, is hard to tell. She is, the New York Times tells us, “at the forefront of experimental comedy”. Hers is not so much a show as a 60-minute preen. We meet a woman whose self-regard needs its own exclusion zone, who assumes we must be fascinated by her every utterance. She isn’t here to perform comedy – perish the vulgar thought! – but to commentate, moment by moment, on the connection she’s making with her crowd. “I’m interested in the different tonalities of your laughter,” she blathers – and she nails the precious little vainglory of this brittle, self-delighted persona.

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