Reviews: Tall tales in the sweat shops

Published on Friday 15 August 2008 17:22

Andrew Maxwell, Pleasance 5 stars

Adams and Rea, Pleasance 4 stars

Terry Saunders, Baby Belly 4 stars

David O'Doherty, The Stand 4 stars

Carey Marx, The Stand 3 stars

Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds, Pleasance Courtyard 2 stars

IF YOU want a copper-bottomed guarantee of a solid hour's laughter then ANDREW MAXWELL offers the maximum bang for your buck. The Dubliner doesn't do jokes. Instead, he simply tells the crowd about the latest scrapes in which his appetite for gutter adventure has landed him. Playing to the inmates of a maximum security prison and gigging for both sides of the Belfast Peace Wall provide the bulk of his latest escapades and Maxwell relates his tales with an infectiously mischievous relish. His tales are edgy without ever setting out to be deliberately provocative. Maxwell's quick wits mean that he can find the funny in a Shankhill murder pub, so it's no surprise that he can hold court at the Pleasance with disarming ease.

Maxwell is in the top tier of Fringe comedians, but there are gems further down the ladder. The mid-afternoon graveyard shift in the fetid surroundings of the Pleasance Hut is not the most promising environment to look for them, but SARAH ADAMS and LEISA REA have a show that will repay the more intrepid gag hound. Admittedly, they get off to a heart-sinkingly mundane start by introducing themselves as "girls who sing about stuff" and launching into a song about Brits on Costa package holidays. Mangling Spanish, boffing the waiter and an aversion to paella are the sort of mined-out topics that Victoria Wood might have covered aeons ago.

Fortunately, they quickly veer into more fertile, darker territory. Old ladies are wrestled to the ground for returning their Catherine Cookson novels to the library 70 years late, child bagpipe prodigies are offed horribly and, in a neat inversion of traditional murder ballads, crap boyfriends are taken down to the canal and done in. Not that it is all gruesome violence. There are plenty of inappropriate sexual gags to even it out. For me, their top song is an anti-litter ditty aimed at school kids and sung in the style of an over-sexed R'n'B artist. Accompanied by much salacious booty-shaking and double entendres, it joyfully stuffs the titter into litter.

Underpinning the songs is the uneasy relationship between the two women, with Adams seldom missing an opportunity to slyly belittle the more flakey Rea. Musically astute and gleefully un-PC, they deserve a bigger stage. Or at least a venue that has air.

Sticking with good comics in bad venues, TERRY SAUNDERS is making a cult of himself in the Baby Belly 3, a damp tunnel which could double as a mushroom farm. His show, Figure 8, is a cleverly structured love story that blends reality, fiction and the bittersweet songs of Elliott Smith. Illustrated with a wilfully homespun Powerpoint cartoon and line drawings, its achingly DIY feel will not be for everybody, but Saunders' low-fi charm and gentle humour makes a great change of pace from hectoring stand-ups.

Irishman DAVID O'DOHERTY comes from a similarly whimsical place, but while he often looks half asleep, his imagination is hardwired to the grid. Rubbishing the self-aggrandising hype of much comedy, O'Doherty prefers to find poetry in the everyday and then softly ridicule it, often using one of the beat-up child's keyboards he has rescued from charity shops. While seemingly every second comic has slipped a gratuitous rape joke into their sets, O'Doherty chooses not to follow the herd and instead does routines in which he follows the course of a love affair through the text messages the two parties send one another. Even when he gets a little raunchy on the subject of threesomes, he defuses any tension by expressing it as a witty mathematical equation.

Less family-friendly is CAREY MARX, whose examination of the top 10 most offensive subjects to use in comedy could be an ugly parade of cheap, attention-seeking shock tactics. To his credit, it isn't. Marx is a professional wind-up merchant, but in this show he resists the temptation to just go for the gags and instead offers a thoughtful explanation of the line between funny and foul.

DOKTOR COCACOLAMCDONALDS' show is called Badly Ranted Thoughts Via The Magic Of Song and it explores the space between comedy and care in the community. Dressed in a rolled-down leotard and nightmare clown paint, the Doktor takes an unorthodox approach to comedy that will divide audiences into two diametrically opposed camps. His nonsense songs, rubbish props and general chaotic demeanour will lead many to the conclusion that the Doktor might benefit from a psychiatrist. In the main, I would agree, but as the show disintegrates towards its bonkers finale it almost generates its own warped logic. I imagine that most people only ever see one of the Doktor's shows, but if they stay to the end they surely emerge with a bemused smile on their faces. v

Andrew Maxwell, Pleasance (0131-556 6550), until August 25, 8.20pm; Adams and Rea, as before, 2.15pm; Terry Saunders, Baby Belly (0844 545 8252), until August 25, 6.05pm; David O'Doherty, The Stand (0131-558 7272), until August 24, 9pm; Carey Marx, The Stand, until August 24, 9.10pm; Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds, Pleasance Courtyard, until August 22, 11pm