Scott Capurro, Teddy, Juliet Meyers, Jim Park, compere Vladimir McTavish - The Stand, Edinburgh, 10/04/2008

They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but this was a night that proved that old adage wrong. On the bill there was only one comedian that I had not seen before, and of the others, none I had last seen more than six months ago, two of them twice within that time. In all honesty, I might have given the show a miss if I hadn’t had been taking a visitor along. But in the end I’m glad not to have.

Vladimir McTavish, it has to be said, is a funny man, but is no MC. His curmudgeonly style is not exactly the best way to get an audience warmed up, and his interaction with that audience leaves a bit to be desired. Beyond a cursory introduction, he makes no great attempt to get to know any of their stories, instead content for the most part to cherry-pick from his large store of material and get the laughs going that way. He did a competent job, but I would prefer to see him as an act rather than performing this role in the future.

First on for the night was Juliet Meyers, the one new name for me. A middle-aged, Jewish and a bit of an aging hippie, she was a bundle of enthusiasm and energy from the word go. Again, as an opening act I would say she did what was required, but she isn’t someone I would particularly seek out again. It was something of a workmanlike performance. Very much a gag-teller, she was funny, but her material was mostly quite obvious and the punchlines were often slightly telegraphed.

Jim Park I have reviewed here twice before, and on both occasions I have been less than enthusiastic. So I’m actually quite pleased this time to be able to say that he is growing on me. With new material in the set, he had re-jigged the best of his older lines into a snappy opening few minutes that had a great rhythm and delivered the laughs well, and the new jokes, when they arrived, were equally strong. Meanwhile the air of vague bewilderment with which he performs disarms the audience and makes him easy to warm to.

Teddy, who followed, I had been equally dismissive of in my last review, and again I can only report a change of opinion. Even though he performed, for the most part, the same material, centred on a lengthy shaggy-dog story about a sexual encounter with the woman of his dreams which turned into a bit of a nightmare, he has clearly been busy trimming and honing the performance in the meantime. As a result, some of the more gratuitous crudeness had been stripped away, and the more bizarre and surreal moments had been highlighted making for a set that was not merely improved, but actually sounded fresher on this occasion than on first hearing it.

And talking of gratuitous crudeness, Scott Capurro is the master of that particular art-form. Seeming to get taller and skinnier every time I see him, the camp San Franciscan could read the phone book and make it sound pornographic. There’s a famous quote by George Carlin that the job of a comedian is to find out where the line is and then cross it, and this is something Capurro seems to have taken very much to heart. He is not a comedian for the faint hearted, as he gleefully pushes and pushes his audience to see how far he can bend them before they will break.

Nothing is off-limits in one of Capurro’s shows, as he runs the gamut of racial and sexual stereotypes, but always if you listen close enough it becomes clear that the butt of the joke is actually ourselves and our own highly-strung middle-class attitudes to these subjects. The basis of his humour is always that people want to tell you what it is and is not acceptable to joke about, without first stopping to consider what it is that they find offensive about it. That most people just hear the key-word and say “you can’t say that,” without listening to the context in which the word is being said. Capurro makes you listen and he makes you think, and he makes you laugh at the same time, and that’s really what all good comedy should be about.

Lemon Custard Comedy Club - Edinburgh, 16/02/2008

Like most artistic media, the world of stand-up is a ladder for the aspiring to climb. At the top there are the theatre tours, and below that the club circuit, chain clubs featuring established acts, independent clubs with a mix and giving opportunities to the up and coming. Then there are the open mic nights for the newcomers. And somewhere in there, there are the underground clubs.

Often run by a comic who acts as host themselves, and featuring their friends or anyone they could talk into coming along to do a set, shoved into whatever venue they could blag for free and run on a budget of tuppence-ha’penny and a packet of juicy fruit, they tend to be informal, sometimes chaotic, and often a lot of fun.

Lemon Custard is the brainchild of Dee Custance, who co-hosts along with Sian Bevan. They make a good pairing. Custance does the “excitable girly-girl” thing, a style that has become popular of late thanks to the success of Josie Long, while Bevan has a more straightforward and grounded style and is the more natural MC of the two and whose "New Year on Calton Hill" story is a highlight of the night. They make their guests feel welcome by handing out lollipops and liquorish allsorts and going round the audience finding out a bit about everyone. This doesn’t take long, the paying public initially numbering ten, although more arrived as the night went on.

Held in the Harlequin Cafe, a little basement organic food eaterie below a bookshop off Buccleugh Street, it was a bizarre location for a comedy night, the room having no real focal point at which to perform, but this helped to create an informal atmosphere where the comics seemed to be more talking with the audience rather than performing for them, and all three of the main acts seemed to cope with the circumstances well.

First up was Austin Low, a spiky haired youngster who has been performing since he was 15. And a very good start it was, Low was a bundle of nervous energy and threw himself into his performance with gusto. Introducing himself as the “Urban Joker,” much of his set was taken up with his campaign to end false advertising, including questioning what exactly is mega about the Megabus, and whether there is any scientifically proven basis for claiming the existence of a Lynx Effect. It was an excellent opening set and left me wanting more, which is always the sign of a good comic.

Following this, the night veered off into the slightly surreal as the audience were invited to participate in a giant game of scrabble, with the slightly altered rule that any word was acceptable, real or not, as long as you could use it in a sentence. As such, between us we managed to enhance the English language with such gems as triangley, zebravem and wankmap, along with my own submission, antifloaty.

Next we had Jim Park, who I had previously seen less than a month ago and was less than impressed with on that occasion. Although understandable, it didn’t really help that his set on this occasion was not merely word for word but pause for pause identical to the previous one. It reinforced my opinion of his set being too calculated, even while he tries to give the impression of a stream of consciousness. It isn’t that I disliked it, just that I found it a little too rigid and structured. That said, however, for the second time I seemed to be in the minority and he went down very well.

Last up was Keir McAllister, who I had also seen recently, and who again performed much of the same material. However, he is a much less rigid, more fluid performer and easily capable of thinking on his feet and adapting his set to the circumstances. As such, although the punchlines were familiar, the setups were often fresh and interesting. And with a headlining spot giving him more time to build his gags rather than rushing from laugh to laugh, and there was also plenty of material I hadn’t heard before including a good routine involving having fun with religious bigots.

Overall it was a strange but fun night, the kind of night that makes you feel a part of, rather than a spectator of, the action. It isn’t a night for the shrinking violet comedy goer, there is no possibility of hiding at the back here, but equally there is no possibility for the performer of hiding behind the stage lights and keeping the audience at a distance. Audience and comic thrust together at close quarters, it makes an interesting dynamic, and a very enjoyable night.

Steve Hughes, Josh Howie, Nick Davies, Jim Park, compere Joe Heenan - The Stand, Edinburgh, 26/01/2008

Most weekends, the line up at the Stand stays fixed from Thursday to Saturday in both the Edinburgh and Glasgow venues. But this week the Glasgow branch was closed for a private function on Saturday, and as Steve Hughes had been headlining there on the previous two nights, they switched him over to Edinburgh presumably rather than let him go elsewhere. As such, he took over top billing, and Joe Heenan, who had been doing a full spot on the other nights, switched over to MC duties.

It was a role he took to well. Very much a blokey type of comic, Heenan joshes good-naturedly with his audience with a big wide grin always fixed to his face. Audience interaction is maybe not his natural element, but he warmed everyone up nicely, and his daft suggestions for how to respond to the announcement of each new act was a winner. (My favourite was, “in the style of Christopher Walken.”)

Tall, curly haired, bespectacled and wearing a very natty suit, Nick Davies performed the opening act looking for all the world like a used car salesman. But appearances can be deceptive, and he quickly proved himself a very capable performer indeed. A Mancunian who has been living in Edinburgh for eight years, much of his material revolved around the differences between English and Scottish culture, and the strange Scots idioms that make it like speaking a foreign language. His routine about directions to Scottish locations was a particular hit.

Jim Park was less of a success, for me at least although he seemed to go down quite well. He performed deadpan humour very much in the style of Norman Lovett, with the same air of someone who had just wandered onto the stage accidentally and felt he might as well do something now he was there. But unlike Norm, who performs this kind of act effortlessly, with Park you could see his mind working the whole time and it just didn’t really come off.

Josh Howie is a Jewish comedian unashamedly inspired by Woody Allen, and it shows. Much of his material consists of the same sort of neurotic intellectual act that Allen made famous, but he has developed his own style around it and it suits him well. One slight problem is that, with his slightly bland looks, unlike say a David Baddiel or an Andy Zaltzman, he needs to announce his Jewishness before he can move on to Jewish based humour, which makes for a slightly awkward moment, but one he manages successfully to integrate into the act. He has good stage presence, and makes some brave choices in material, and I’d expect to see him around the circuit for a long time to come.

Attending one of Steve Hughes’ shows is always part comedy part educational experience. Hughes takes his audience through detailed explanations of the military-economic complex which shores up a world order controlled by a cabal of old money families who control governments and create the world in their own preferred image. But he never forgets to add a punchline. He’s got the look for it as well. With his long straggly hair, wild eyes and big scary grin he looks, for all the world, like he should be an old testament prophet of doom, rather than an Australian former heavy metal drummer.

But Hughes doesn’t do exclusively political material. He casts his eye far and wide over a whole range of subjects, from life in his native Australia, through why straight is the new gay, masturbation in hotel rooms and on to the X Factor, the last two not being all that different come to think of it. The strange thing being that, having seen Hughes several times over the last few years, the majority of the material was not new to me, and yet somehow he has the charisma and the character to make it feel fresh. He has a force of personality that seems to burst off the stage and infect everyone in the venue, and it is this quality that puts him among the most exciting comics working the circuit right now.