Comedy review: Andrew O’Neill - The Stand, Edinburgh

Such a prospect could leave some imagining a rather hectoring and right-on comic with more views than punchlines. Not a bit of it.

O’Neill is far better than any crass pigeonholing could ever suggest and offers a delightful mish-mash of the silly and the cerebral. For every espousal of his left-leaning social outlook or potent advocacy of squatting, there’s a crazy cockney dance or surreal outburst worthy of Harry Hill at his peak.

Having been awarded the Stewart Lee seal of approval, O’Neill humbly returns the favour with routines dissecting well-worn phrases (“in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king”) and creating a whirligig of analogies about a single subject (hitch-hiking). If you slowed them down a bit in your head, these sections could easily be imagined in his master’s voice.

There’s an even more direct nod to the deliberately exasperating set-ups pioneered by Richard Herring; here O’Neill wilfully threatened to alienate his gathering with an elongated dialogue in which a pair of east Europeans haggled over gravy.

While that sort of inadvisable risk-taking is purely at the comic’s own discretion, for this performance he was at the mercy of faulty technology for his showpiece finale, a short film which harks back to the story of his dad’s attempt to convince everyone that he once landed on the Moon.

There’s a killer show lurking in Andrew O’Neill’s accessible and amiable locker; try as he might, Alternative isn’t quite it.

Rating: ***