Just the Tonic at the Tron
Aug 6-14, 16-28 (17.00)

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‘Easter Eggs’, in modern parlance, are hidden delights which add layers and meaning to the central narrative, within computer games. Players only find if they really want to seek them out, if this particular computer game is ‘just your thing’. Sitting on the train back to Fife after a full days reviewing, I glanced over my notes for Erynn Tett’s masterful hour long set of surreal one liners and audience based market research, and found myself presented with Easter eggs by the bucketload.

The basement of the Tron holds a special place in my heart. It was here that I first saw Mick Ferry floor a multinational audience of drunks, tourists, and steamers with his working mans club act of untouchable class. It was also where I found myself in a heckling match with Doug Stanhope, in front of my ex-girlfriend and her new fiancé. I am no stranger to a breadth of emotional responses within this particular steamy comedy dungeon. This perhaps prepared me for the fabulously idiosyncratic, often challenging, but never less than captivating hour of truly original material I ‘experienced’ at the hands of a performer who segued between the delivery of Steven Wright, a sad sack, awkward and incredibly spectrumy one-liner master from the states, physical comedy with all the precision awkwardness of Emo Philips, and a corporate automaton who flummoxes the participants in the ‘feedback’ sessions by using ratings analogies which, whilst obtuse, were still more instantly fathomable than around 50% of the material delivered as outright comedy.

Make no mistake, the one-liners in this set veer from odd, to plain surreal. Topics covered include cocky geraniums, insecure chameleons, and car parks in deep denial of their true nature. If this sounds like polarising material, Tett herself confirms so, highlighting that she ‘broke-up a family’ last week, when it came to the market research sections of her show. Audience participation is gentle, though compulsory, and it was genuinely intriguing in such a small crowd to see how audience members responded to the opinions of others, and manipulation via the previously described bizarre & opaque ratings frameworks & KPI measures which each audience member was huckled into using to validate their own opinions on the show so far. I for one was enthralled.

It is not only the originality of the material which makes this show a triumph, it is Tett’s commitment to character, and clowning prowess, which truly draws you in. It constantly feels close to car crash territory, and yet this is actually a superbly structured piece of art which Richard Gadd would be proud of. Another of the Bearpit Podcast alumni, Mat Ewins, came to mind whenever the audio visual aids popped in to robotically communicate that we were entering ‘review’ phase. The attention to detail in every area was meticulous.

If this all feels a bit much for you, then it quite possibly would be. This is not a show for everyone, and in committing so fully to that Erryn Tett has created an hour of performance which is funny, of it’s time, and bitingly satirical. It also allows Tett to deliver a show which achieves precisely what it subtly hopes to achieve in skewering the onslaught of algorithms omnipresent in our daily lives, dumbing down, and homogenising tastes, to the N’th degree.

Throughout the show, we are presented with feedback from previous audiences, one notable quote from an audience member halfway through a previous set was “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but I’m having a nice time”. One of todays crowd was bold enough, when asked, to state that he would recommend this show to precisely 93% of his friends. I can only feel sorry for those in his circle considered to be the unadventurous 7%.

Compulsive viewing of the highest order, and given that the performance I watched was her second preview, this award worthy hour of stand up/come performance art/come interactive theatre is likely to yet hit its true stride. Get down to see it at the Tron before the 5 star reviews start flooding in, and the nominations start stacking up.

Ewan Law

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Gilded Balloon – Patter House
Aug 5-15, 17-28 (15.40)

The Patter House is situated at the bottom of Chambers St and is a grand arena for a comedy show. With many venue spaces inside I waited at the colourful bar until being shown to the room where Lucy Frederick awaited. She is a regular on the comedy circuit having appeared at The Top Secret Comedy Club, The Stand and Just the Tonic amongst lots of others. Now she’s in Edinburgh strutting her stuff; an energetic, confident and candid story-teller who had a philosophical and very comical approach to teaching the audience the value of self-love and acceptance. Her wedding anecdotes got many giggles despite the audience was early-Fringe quiet. She has a big personality designed for a big audience and her show would make a great start to any girly night out. The boys will love it too, but Lucy definitely appeals to the wee princess in all the ladies’ hearts.

I thoroughly enjoyed her theatrical delivery, while the power-point presentation of photographs gave a very personal touch to a witty portrayal of what it feels like to get hitched. My favourite part was the anecdote about her granny talking to her deaf grandad. Lucy enacted the entire conversation and I felt like I was in the very room with her & her grandparents, while making a serious subject humorous without being offensive. Excellent suspension of disbelief.

Watching Lucy in full flow felt at times as though I was being subliminally therapised into feeling confident and happy within myself. Very relatable content and I wish her all the best in her marriage and for her future shows.

Bobbi McKenzie

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Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose
Aug 5-28 (14:10)

As any gigging comic will tell you, one-liners are a deceptively simple form of stand-up comedy. The timing, the tone, the pace and the punctuation of every single gag requires a level of dedication and sheer bloody mindedness to master. I’ve been fortunate enough to have the joyous experience of watching one of the masters of the art, Masai Graham, perform 30 minute sets which contained as much consideration and dedication to their crafting as a 2hr Stewart Lee performance. So for Will Mars to dedicate a full hour, and a semi-autobiographical one at that, to the artform, is a bold statement of intent.

To deliver a whole set of one liners one needs to consider that an audience can only laugh for so long without feeling exhausted, and that preceding gags inevitably present an unavoidable economy of diminishing returns if delivered at a tempo which renders them subliminal to the crowd. Mars warmed up the crowd with some nicely high energy Daft Punk tunes which I hoped was to mitigate for the Thursday afternoon, sweat drenched slumber which takes over even the most committed of fans in the inevitable dungeons of whichever large venue one has been allocated by, in this instance, The Gilded Balloon. I murmured a soft prayer that it was not a portent of the pace of the performance to come.

This concern was dispelled from the moment our host’s droll Northern tone came through the PA system announcing the beginning of the show. 3 gags were delivered before Will had begun treading the boards, and rather than knocking us off our feet with the sharpest lines of the set, he warmed us up to the tone of the engaging, honest, funny and at times genuinely next level show we were about to receive.

There was a broad spread of demographics throughout the room, and over the course of the laid back, yet break-neck, 55 minutes and 300 gags, the laughter rippled around the room like waveforms. This is one of the most masterful aspects of Will’s show, he manages to deliver a set which has moments that everyone present could connect with. A recurring theme throughout my day of reviewing was white male comedians taking a beautifully human swipe at their own privileges in a manner which very much defies the notion that being ‘Woke’, & being precious, easily offended and virtue signalling are mutually exclusive things.

We are eased into the performance via clear status setting. He is ‘not good with people’, and ‘even dogs hate him’, and if it weren’t for the fantastically crafted darker sections of his act I would have complained that the low status positioning didn’t sit with the effortless performance and genuine warmth for the audience which came off the stage throughout. As mentioned earlier though, one liner sets are all about pacing, and Will Mars crafted this particular marathon with the skill and nounce of a ‘couch to 5k’ podcast coach. Some lovely ‘Yo mama’ gags, about himself, in which he dissected his neuroses and laid out groundwork for heavier material about his upbringing, showed his versatility with the form, and offered us a metaphorical ‘cup of tea’ to let us know he wouldn’t be spilling out his yarn in double quick time. He was not more eager to perform than to story-tell. This allowed the audience to appreciate the slick changes of pace when he moved into a more interactive mode, or crafted wickedly sharp close to the bone jokes on topics which most would comedians who aren’t Frankie Boyle would be too anxious to broach at 3pm.

There are very topical and serious themes of imposter syndrome, poverty, childhood abandonment, breast feeding, and domestic violence woven throughout genuinely gut busting 1 punch hits. I laughed so hard I was accused of being a shill at more than one point. The audience interaction showed Mars to be a confident and playful performer, and his decision to narrate a large portion of his own performance in the third person allowed him an intimacy with his audience that produced one of the most obscene and surreal flights of pornographic fancy I’ve seen spontaneously produced. ‘Tyrone’, the very handsome man sitting not too far to my right, I suspect may be traumatised. The rest of us were delighted.

There is still a lot of work to be done to polish this show up into the sum of it’s parts, and I was reviewing on a preview day. It is also inevitable that in a show with 300 gags there are going to be a couple of non-sequiters, and muddled linkage between sections interrupted the otherwise excellent timing on a couple of occasions. Given that the show was 55 minutes of one-liners, and a mini-story of Will’s life, a clearer form of delineation between the ‘sections’ would also have been beneficial. I would however pay hard cash any day of the week to see the topical aspects of this show played to anyone who thinks you can’t make good jokes about hard subjects and not punch down. There were numerous occasions when ‘sensitive’ topics which could have delivered 70’s style cheap laughs instead subverted expectations and presented our performer as someone we could all connect with. Quite an achievement for a show which is ‘just’ one liners. This is a talented man with a Fringe show that gives the punters exactly what they want. I left the performance with a smile on my face, laughter lines around my eyes, and a genuine warmth in my belly.

Ewan Law

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The Mumble Scoring System Explained

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Every Sunday I like to go to Stockbridge & buy a couple of pounds of my favorite grapes, which arrive there from Mauritius that morning. Chomping on a juicy handful last Sunday, I began making my way up through the New Town, arriving in the York Place area where the trams are. This is Stand country, & a few years ago was the epicentre of laughter in the Fringe. These days its all a bit like a weekday wake & might as well be out in Fife, for there has been a seismic shift to one Edinburgh street in particular – the sloping, cobbled thoroughfare between the Cowgate & the Bridges that is Blair Street. This is the real epicentre of Fringe comedy these days; where comedians, punters & flyerers mingle in a smiling Sunset Strip.

Things evolve, & the stranglehold The Stand had on making people pay for ‘safe’ mainstream comedy has been utterly smashed by the innovations of the Free Fringe & its quality, liberty-laden shows. All things change – I mean I’m actually writing this article on a speech-to-text app walking through Holyrood Park on the way into town. So if Fringe comedy can evolve, what about the ancient art of reviewing. Think of those ancient Greeks who first stepped down from the Dionysis theatre during the reign of Pesistratus, who had just observed the very first play there from its seats, who have been babbling opinions & critiques to each other as soon as they left the hilltop. Criticism is as old as the performance art it observes, so how does its own evolution fare in 2022?

Well, not that much really. Beyond the windows of Mumble Towers, the Fringe Press of 2022 seems an archaic institution – chained to amateur rules dished out by a hereditary feudal demense, & a narrow luddite marking system which, even if the stars are split into halves, can only ever give a ‘marks out of ten’ assessment. But half-stars are an ugly aesthetic, a deformed evolution of the species. Like Darwin says, it’s not the biggest or the fastest that survives, but the one that adapts. If the five-star marking system is not to go extinct, it must evolve from its primitive 5-point Ape, through the Homo Erectus 10-point system of halves, & into something more suitable for an increasingly sophisticated modern world.

The trained reviewer can actually feel a show’s quality as 1,2,3,4,5 within moments of the start. So what are the qualities that provide such an esoteric sensation. Since 2016, the Mumble had identified three factors in each of its genres. For Comedy, we had Material, Delivery & Laughs; while for Theatre we had Stagecraft, Script & Performance. This was an improvement on the old system, where now in essence a score was obtained between 1 and 15, the Neanderthal if you will. As the Mumble went into the 2019 Fringe, we were still using this system, but have finally recognized there was still a certain imprecision to the score.

Under our old system, to obtain four stars, for example, a show needed to score 3.66 – which is simply closer to 4 than 3. The overall marks would then be described as a low four, a natural four or a high four. The eureka moment came the other day while sitting in two comedy shows. On one occasion I was the only one laughing, while at the other show the room was in uproar & I was sat stony-gilled. It was time to add that factor into the marking mix, the Room… how does a comedian play their audience, do they keep tickling funny bones like a comedy octopus, or is each viewer sat there playing on their phones.

The Room category in Comedy has a natural cousin in Theatre. I have called it S.O.D, with the first review to use it being published in 2019. Quick off the mark, the company sent me this email;

Dear Mumble

We have asked our wonderful PR company; we have asked the amazing Pleasance Press Office; we have asked the astonishing Head of Programming at The Pleasance – no one can help.
We are delighted by our review by the excellent Daniel Donnelly, but no one seems to know what S.O.D. stands for!

Please can you elucidate?

Many thanks
(and I’ll get the prize for the first one home with the answer!)

The answer is, of course, Suspension of Disbelief. I know my poetry, & within Coleridge’s wonderful Biographia Literia, he elucidated on the driving phantasian spirit behind his co-creation of the Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth. Its essence is the state of mind reached where there is, ‘a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith… awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.’ In modern lay terms its like switching off reality & becoming immersed in the production. Is that your mate Nigel before you? Do you see them behind the make-up, or are you lost in the drama & believe this drag-queen before you is the fabulous Nigella?

The introduction of another genome into the star system, the aforetitled Expansion of the Mumbleverse, seems wholly natural. Our planet is divided into four seasons, the main elements are still earth, fire, air & water. The four bodily humors were part of Shakespearean cosmology, inherited from the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses divided the Ages into Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. Now the reviewing star system can also be divided into four harmonious parts. Marking-wise, to obtain those 4 stars, a show must now be awarded at least 3.75 points as opposed to 3.66. The overall marking goes like this

19-20 = 5 stars
15-18 = 4 stars
11-14 = 3 stars
7-10 = 2 stars
1-6 = 1 star

As cultural surveyors, The Mumble can now give a more detailed account of a show for both artist & potential audience member – its now a case of, “you need to sort your tiles out, pal, and there’s a bit of damp in your back bedroom – you’re wirings seen better days and of course you’re gonna have to update your boiler system, it’ll never pass the new laws.“