FESTIVAL COMEDY | Reviews
EDDIE PEPITONE Reclaiming the true art of stand-up ●●●●●
It doesn’t feel like you’ve had the full Fringe experience until you’ve seen an overweight, bald man ranting at you. Here in Edinburgh that could be on a stage or in Tesco. And in either place it could be Eddie Pepitone. The American is one of those stand-ups who persists in planing away against the grain, whose show you come away from feeling that more comics should be like him rather than chasing TV deals.
Pepitone acts like a man who doesn’t care and looks like one
too: he’s a bit saggy and loose at the seams. Of course, he really does care and there’s a huge amount of passion here. At times it almost feels like a left-wing rally. Shaking his head recounting that most Americans are only a couple of paychecks away from homelessness on account of the harsh housing system, elsewhere he steps into the surreal notion of product placement in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Some observations, such as how the minutiae of our lives become bigger issues to us than world concerns, might not be the most groundbreaking, but Pepitone invests it with such performance and gusto that you actually start to believe that the cereal spilt under the fridge is almost more important than the conflict in Gaza.
Despite being very much in control, there’s a lovely unhinged, flying-by-the-seat-of-his-pants quality to Pepitone. Indeed, in one extended section he imagines and plays out a scenario in which the mentally ill – in this case a man who has killed – publicly share their experiences at a major sporting event. It’s almost difficult to tell which is the ‘mad’ man and which is Eddie Pepitone. Dark, slightly unnerving and questioning. (Marissa Burgess) ■ Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, until 24 Aug (not 11), 9pm, £12–£14 (£10–£12).
THUNDERBARDS A sketch bar that was set too high ●●●●● AHIR SHAH Clever but often frantic set ●●●●●
FELICITY WARD Strong hour against all the odds ●●●●●
There’s nothing quite like that difficult second album syndrome to separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls. And while Thünderbards’ Seconds is far from a disaster, it doesn’t quite match the majesty of their acclaimed 2013 show. The chemistry between Glenn Moore (the tall
speccy one) and Matt Stevens (the tall non-speccy one) as well as their broad ingenuity is certainly still intact. But there’s one scientific analysis that can be undertaken to determine whether they are as good as last year: count up the number of sketches that are great now compared to then and you’ll find your answer right there.
For Seconds, they have adopted the old time- travelling motif (McNeil and Pamphilon made that work better in this very room a few years back) in order to shoehorn sketches in about estate agents, librarians, Rosa Parks and Seal. Ostensibly they are all family members of the duo (though, the latter two might not be), but there’s no plot-driven necessity for that to be so. But the biggest mystery of all remains unanswered: why put an umlaut over the ‘u’ in your name if you then don’t pronounce it yourself? (Brian Donaldson) ■ Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, until 24 Aug, 4.45pm, £10–£12 (£8–£10).
50 THE LIST FESTIVAL 7–14 Aug 2014
Ahir Shah could probably write this review himself. He chucks in self-assessing jibes (mostly nailing it) all through his smart, thespy show. A Cambridge graduate and one-time writer for Skins, he praises his own ‘linguistic verve’ and ‘exquisite structural callbacks’, adding that he’d make ‘a very funny lecturer’ but a ‘bad stand-up’. That last bit’s not true, but there are points where his pseudo- academic flourishes lose the crowd. Constantly signposting and annotating his set,
he knows it’s a mix of ‘the adult and juvenile’: he’s a 23-year-old Londoner who reads Stendhal but doesn’t understand Snapchat. Mixing laments about ‘being priced out of being a Londoner’, and feeling ‘otherised’ (he describes his appearance as ‘the physique of a man you could save for just £2 a month!’) he also buzzes between colonialism, binge drinking and the elephant god Ganesh. It’s an intelligent, if too-frantic set, but the shape
of an intriguing comedian is definitely emerging. Shah’s eyes dazzle towards the few in the crowd laughing at his more obscure gags: ‘You will form the vanguard of my bloodless coup!’ Who could turn that down? (Claire Sawers) ■ Laughing Horse @ The Counting House, 667 7533, until 24 Aug, 5pm, free.
Despite the presence of a near month-long chest infection, Australian comic Felicity ‘Flick’ Ward is soldiering on with what will surely prove to be one of the most entertaining stand-up shows on the Fringe this August. Though ‘stand-up’ doesn’t quite cover it by half. Ward wriggles, contorts, sways, jogs, shimmies and even sits down for an hour. She does cough quite a lot, but that’s purely improvised whenever the fancy takes her. The theme of her show, The Iceberg, is about being blindsided by life when you least need or expect it: that infection is acting almost like the perfect metaphor. There’s a little bit of politics (her country’s leader, Tony Abbott, gets it square in the neck), some material about cricket fans (she analyses her own compatriots, comparing them unfavourably to the Barmy Army) and an awful lot about watermelon hats to the point here she has to apologise for saying ‘watermelon’ too many times. A few sequences threaten to veer the hour into
hack (the ‘different ways you can cry’ routine felt like filler), but whenever things derail, Ward drags it right back on track, even unleashing a genuine surprise or two. (Brian Donaldson) ■ Underbelly, Bristo Square, 0844 545 8252, until 25 Aug (not 11), 9.25pm, £11–£13 (£10–£12).
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