Festival Comedy list.co.uk/festival
Telephone Booking Fringe 0131 226 0000 International Festival 0131 473 2000 Book Festival 0845 373 5888 Art Festival 07500 461 332 DAVID QUIRK A worldview containing beauty and beastliness ●●●●●
the Fringe at burlesque cabarets or ladyboys gigs, Jennifer Coolidge is here to tell us that she is sick of LA. Hell, she might even decamp to the UK. Implausible as that seems, she’d just be coming for the men, given that she finds the homeless guy outside her hotel ravishing.
The Coolidge voice is a bizarre amalgam of Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe and she wields it to cut
swathes through the current crop of showbiz stars from Paris Hilton, Brazilian supermodel Gisele and Renée Zellweger, while reserving special vitriol for the female stars of yesteryear who go hell for leather in denying their face has ever met a plastic surgeon’s scalpel. As an hour of stand-up this is paltry fare. Better to view it as the most inappropriately hilarious job interview ever with an
effervescent candidate revealing too many details of her salacious CV. (Brian Donaldson) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 29 Aug (not 24), 8.15pm, £12–£14 (£11–£13). NEXT ISSUE OUT WEDNESDAY 25 AUGUST
We’re accustomed to our Aussie Fringe comics being a bit larger than life and ranting aloud their darker thoughts. David Quirk, then, is somewhat atypical. He’s certainly not afraid to delve around in the murkier regions of existence though – particularly with the routines about necrophilia, incest and suicide – but does so with such a quiet calm that when he raises his voice slightly to force through a point, it’s almost as though he’s bellowing at us. None of which should be viewed as criticism. Quirk is a refreshing addition to the Edinburgh fold, someone who can take apart any unwanted audience participation with a withering, whispering retort and possesses a beautifully eschewed worldview which he lays before us with often rambling tales and seemingly impotent non sequiturs. Not for nothing is his hour entitled I Don’t Wanna Tell Jokes and after a dry-ice metal-soundtrack intro, he proceeds to wind the gig down from the off, chucking out off-kilter thoughts that you may not always laugh at but won’t stop thinking about. (Brian Donaldson) ■ Assembly Hall, 623 3030, until 29 Aug (not 23), 8pm, £10–£11 (£9–£10).
JENNIFER COOLIDGE A CV full of amusing titbits ●●●●●
Tottering on stage in a tight blue dress and heels that are usually only seen on
40 THE LIST 19–26 Aug 2010
CHARLYNE YI Don’t believe the hype ●●●●●
The Assembly Rooms like their North American female comics to be a bit kooky. Maria Bamford and Kristen Schaal have mined an offbeat seam to glory at this venue over the last few years, but Charlyne Yi doesn’t quite have what it takes to follow fully in their footsteps. Still, it all opened promisingly enough with a neat visual gag and a deliberately bad rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ on her guitar, lending those early suggestions that she was the new Demetri Martin to be replaced by thoughts that she may be closer to a 21st century Les Dawson. Her name has even been uttered in the sentences alongside Andy Kaufman, but while the latter made great play in keeping the mystery alive about who he was and what the hell he was up to, Yi lunges into the audience near the end to implore us to question
whether we know the difference between reality and fantasy. Where Kaufman made audiences laugh with pity or scowl with fury, Yi’s show dabbles too often in tedious repetition and even in wholly unironic schmaltz.
Give the attendant hype and her background in lo-fi indie movies, Dances on the Moon is a crushing disappointment, which begins to falter with the short music video she has conceived about a relationship break-up. The joke arrives 20 seconds in, but three minutes later we’re waiting for the thing to stop. When it finally ends, she reappears on stage to relive the routine in front of us. Her climax is a not-for-everyone sequence featuring video footage of her own birth (at least that’s what she tells us, but given what’s come before, how can we know?) as she sits by plucking at a harp. Like her tights, this show is full of holes. (Brian Donaldson) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 29 Aug (not 24), 7pm, £12–£13 (£11–£12).