If he hasn’t, you’ll know what it’s like to watch Mark Olver (Pleasance, 8.25pm, Two stars ). There’s nothing wrong with Olver. He’s amiable, jolly, likes doing warm- up for Noel Edmonds, but he grapples ineffectually with the crowd, smiles, thanks us, and that’s it. After you’ve paid £8.50, it’s a letdown to see a club comic barely stretch himself.
There’s a perpetual whinge at the Fringe that club comics don’t get respect: “What’s wrong with just telling jokes? Isn’t that what comedy is about?”
Well, yes and no. There’s nothing wrong with eating a meringue. It’s a meringue-based diet that doesn’t work. An hour of stand-up is fine if each joke is as good as the next, and the set gradually builds to the biggest laugh of the night. There are distressingly few comics who can pull that off. For everyone else, some revelation or theme, some ambition beyond a stretched-out 20-minute set, satisfies more than yet another gag. We’re interested in people, love, despair, hope, redemption, beauty. If you can cover that ground and make us laugh, you’re a comic of monumental skill.
AL Kennedy, novelist and activist, ought to be able to do that, but just misses her mark. Doug Stanhope, drug-taking waster, should not be able to, but very nearly does. Kennedy (Stand, 3pm, Three stars) came to stand-up after being the token funny at political rallies and facing an emotional crisis. As a result, her set is half political, half personal. The personal stuff is great — grotesque descriptions of sex as her body ages and humiliating tales of being caught masturbating a cat. But her political stuff is surprisingly run-of-the-mill. The joke about a surgical strike with a smart missile has been around since the first Gulf war. If she dropped the politics, she’d storm it.
Stanhope (Tron, 11.55pm, Four stars) is regularly lumped in with angry compatriots like Bill Hicks, but he’s claimed his own turf this year. His baby face seems suffused with self-loathing. He rejects graceful ageing, but knows the drinkers in his bar will always be 20 while he totters towards death. His late-night crowd love his tales of excess, perhaps unaware of the undercurrent of insomnia and despair. An audience member thrust a pill down him mid-routine, which cut in towards the end of the set as he struggled, successfully, to maintain and entertain. Compelling.
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Of course, finding the sinews to knit together your comedy muscles can be tricky. This year, comics have trawled the Schnitzler play La Ronde (Laurence & Gus, Pleasance, 5pm, Four stars); Gogol’s Diary of a Madman (Kevin McAleer, Stand, 5.40pm, Two stars); and almost every prison film ever made (Dutch Elm Conservatoire, Pleasance, 5pm, Two stars).
Lawrence & Gus string together sharp, pacy sketches connected by one character from each appearing in the next. A hit man shoots an actor in an audition, then asks his divorced friend for career advice (“How much would you charge for a bouquet? £10,000? I thought everything started at £10,000”); the friend insults a dry cleaner, who meets a property bore at a party, and so on. Gradually, jokes join up, until we end by watching the actor prepare for his fatal audition. It’s clever, at times a little bit too clever, but it’s what Fringe comedy should aim for.
McAleer’s show reveals a delightfully surreal mind: “Two guys knocked at my door and said, ‘We want to talk to you about Jesus.’ I said, ‘Oh, no, what’s he done now?’” He links his quips as a conspiracy theorist who wears a tinfoil hat to stop the government reading his mind. It’s initially disconcerting, as McAleer eschews costume, but once you grasp the idea, it jogs along nicely. But Dutch Elm Conservatoire, who burst onto the Fringe with a deserved Perrier nomination last year, lack energy this time. There’s huge talent in this troupe, they just need to keep things fresh.
Speaking of fresh, Lucy Porter (Pleasance, 9.30pm, Four stars) works a vegetable theme into her show. Dressed as a carrot, she explains her desire to atone and live a more sustainable life. Along the way, she neatly skewers slices of popular culture. On the World Cup: “If I wanted to watch a bunch of English sex offenders run around abroad, I could go to Thailand.”
Finally, contradicting all my earlier points, Ray Peacock (Pleasance, 11pm, Three stars) has dropped his abrasive character comedy to deliver a simple, honest stand-up set, and it works. He needs to polish, but it’s curiously charming, even when it’s about animal porn. Now that’s a woolly theme.