Tony Law, Stephen Dick, Eddie Hoo, Eilidh MacAskill, compere Sandy Nelson - The Stand, Edinburgh, 13/09/2008

Photo courtesy Diamond Geyser, reproduced under a Creative Commons license

September at the Stand tends to be a quiet month, as the city calms down after the excesses of the festival, but the club still fairly buzzes for a weekend show, and while the lineups may feature some less well known names, they still manage to draw the odd top headliner to pull in the punters.

Glaswegian Sandy Nelson is one of the regular MCs at the club, and always sets a good tone for the night. He has a quick mind and a way with a snappy retort, and he is served well on this night by the presence at the front of a large gaggle of Welsh thirtysomething women out on a birthday shindig (but amazingly not a hen party,) together with a group of squaddies standing near the back who he attempts to hook up with them.

Sadly, his initial efforts go to waste when opening act Eddie Hoo takes the stage. At this level one tends to expect that the opener will be a well established club act with experience, professionalism and finely crafted routines. Hoo demonstrated none of these things. He looked uncomfortable and nervous, stumbled over his words, and his jokes suffered from overly complicated and convoluted set-ups leading to punchlines which seldom rose above the level of "and then I fucked her." He was clearly attempting to be controversial, but doing so with such an utter lack of wit or charm that he barely raised a titter despite this being a crowd that was clearly "up for it." In the ten minute try-out spot, this may have been just about acceptable, but as an opener it was highly disappointing. Hoo does seem to have been on the circuit for some time, so one can only hope this was merely an off night.

Thankfully, this turned out to be a temporary abberation, as the try-out act, musical comedian Eilidh MacAskill, turned out to be an utter delight from beginning to end. Billing her act as Eilidh's Daily Ukelele Ceilidh (all of these words rhyme with Daily for the uninitiated,) she fired off silly jokes and daft songs which were short enough to hit their mark quickly without ever outstaying their welcome. With a bright and engaging personality, she held the crowd easily and I could happily have sat through a set twice as long.

Main support Stephen Dick is well established on the Scottish scene as a comedy magician who, thankfully, keeps the emphasis firmly on the comedy. The magic, it has to be said, was nothing out of the ordinary, the usual card tricks that we have seen a hundred times before, together with the old chestnut of taking money from an audience member and seemingly destroying it before restoring it unharmed. But there's very little else a magician could do in the close confines of the Stand's tiny stage, and what Dick does very well is to supplement the tricks with some great gags and some fine self-deprecating humour, as well as putting the odd new twist on the trick to keep it reasonably fresh.

And so we come to headliner Tony Law, a master of surreal and twisted humour who, after a slightly shaky start, quickly has the audience in the palm of his hand, so much so that despite massively overrunning his slot he continues to hold their rapt attention with not so much as a single fidget in a seat.

Law's act affects a constant bewilderment at the world around him, but it's not a world the rest of us would recognise, populated as it is with random anthropomorphisms conjured out of an imagination most of us would give everything we own just to spend one day in. The bulk of the set is taken up with an instructive guide to setting up a fight between a black bear and a shark, but his attention is easily drawn such that this line of thought is regularly abandoned as he trails off onto yet another lengthy digression.

This is a kind of comedy that you have to be in the mood for, but on this night the audience certainly were, and rounded off the night well. A night of ups and downs, to be sure, but with the ups firmly in the majority.

Jo Caulfield, Wilson Dixon, Donnchadh O'Conaill, Andrew O'Neill, compere Sandy Nelson - The Stand, Edinburgh, 15/03/2008

Saturday nights at the Stand can usually command a pretty strong line-up, but it has to be said that this was one of the strongest. When even the ten minute spot is occupied by a recognisable name comedian, you know you are onto a winner.

The quality showed right from the very beginning, as Sandy Nelson proved himself to be a quite excellent MC with just the right qualities needed for that job. He knows exactly when to push and when to hold back, and exactly where the line is to keep the audience on his side and having a good time. On this evening his job is made much easier by a family from Livingstone on the front row out to celebrate their daughter’s particular milestone birthday which she really didn’t want discussed.

Donnchadh O’Conaill’s job as the opening act was not made easy by a disturbance going on to one side of the club which resulted in some patrons being ejected. But he dealt with the matter well, and with humour, and while his set wasn’t the brightest of the night, he nonetheless gave a good account of himself. A gangly blonde-haired Irishman, his slow-paced, downbeat humour was mainly based in his own social awkwardness. But if that sounds depressing, it’s the care with which he has put his set together with a marvellous mastery of wordplay that ensures that it isn’t. Relatively new to the scene, after winning the Chortle Student Comedy award two years ago, he isn’t the finished article quite yet. But he shows enough to be able to predict that he eventually will be.

It was strange seeing Andrew O’Neill, now a battle-hardened Fringe veteran of many years’ standing, in the slot usually reserved for relative newcomers. But in a way it was a good spot for him, because it forced him to tighten up his usually surreal and meandering monologues which can take a while for an audience to get into. He still produced a number of his bizarre trademark asides, bursting onto the stage with a song about a hot bus. But his bizarre goth appearance tells the audience straight away not to expect straightforward humour, and spending most of his set discussing the problems of being a heterosexual transvestite, while certainly unconventional, seems to work very well.

The slight leftfield approach to the evening continued into Wilson Dixon’s set. Dixon is a musical comedian with a character based set. With an improbably large ten gallon hat and obviously fake long hair, he introduces himself as a country singer from Cripple Creek in the Rocky Mountains, and frequently relies for laughs on wrong-footing the audience, setting up jokes so you think you know where they are heading before sending them in totally unexpected directions for the punchline. Between the songs his softly spoken drawl is sometimes a little hard to hear, but it is worth listening to.

Jo Caulfield has, over the last decade, become one of the most successful and instantly recognised female comics in the country. Known for her frequent appearances on panel shows such as Mock the Week and HIGNFY, she also has her own Radio 4 series, and was head writer for So Graham Norton. All of which is merely background to the fact that she is also a damned fine stand-up.

Her comedy has always been slightly barbed, that of a person irritated that the world is mostly populated by dimwits, and she adopts a style where she is your acerbic best friend embarking with you on a marathon bitching session. And of course it works because, for the most part, we agree with every word she says. However, there was a sense in the show that this was a case of getting a bit more mileage out of last year’s material before developing a new show in time for the Fringe, and some sections felt a little dated. It could be said to be a bit lazy to still be doing gags about John Smeaton and the Glasgow airport attack a year on.

That said, for the most part the set had a little bit for everyone, using a general scattergun approach, and she is a hard act not to warm to. And after three slightly unconventional acts, it was probably best to end with a safe pair of hands, with the overall result of a highly successful night all round.