Tony Cantwell: You Cry Weird, Edinburgh Fringe Comedy review: 'Droll, unhurried and vulnerable'

Tony Cantwell | Sinead Murphy, The Collaboratio

Tony Cantwell: You Cry Weird ★★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) run ended

Tony Cantwell is on his third therapist, and I sympathise with the mental health professionals, as he repeatedly disavows trauma that he doesn't even have. With his resistance to confronting changes to the cosy reality he's erected and his propensity to embark on tangents, he must be a tricky patient. Happily though, his tendency to controlled digression and his desire to make people like him serves him well in his stand-up, with the Irishman an unfolding book about the childhood embarrassments that have shaped him. That the show is bookended by him having a breakdown on a running machine and welling up over an episode of children's television classic Bluey gives some indication of the emotional rollercoaster he takes his audience on.

The trigger for his initial breakdown came during a great professional year for the comic, his appearance on Ireland's much derided version of the Last One Laughing TV show notwithstanding. But chancing upon a discarded piece of exercise equipment during a celebratory Christmas night out with the lads took him from the most performative of macho behaviour to the insecurities of his childhood.

Though a chubby and romantically unsuccessful kid, Cantwell's issues go deeper as he was also spectacularly oblivious, his matter-of-fact approach to correcting these shortcomings laughable. As with his parents' divorce and the dubious but well-meaning way they explained it for their children, he's capable of recalling his contemporary ignorance in intricate detail, but boils it all down to an instructive lesson hard-learned decades after the event.

Droll, unhurried and vulnerable to a degree that exceeds even most stand-ups, You Cry Weird is a show you'll want to lean in for.

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