Comedy review: Jake Yapp Is One In A Million

This is the art and the craft of comedy at such a high level my ears were popping. Jake Yapp does things with his hour that bring to mind a less obviously intellectually tumescent Robert Newman.

Star rating: ****

Underbelly George Square (Venue 300)

If you want to see how to take some acute character comedy, Hippocratian philosphy, Bernaysian philosophy, history, Wilhelm Reich’s obsession with the problems of a constricted orgone flow, veganism, Isis, the vagaries of the elderly and The Tiger Who Came To Tea and weave them into non-stop laughter, come and see this show.

If you want to watch a funny, clever bloke gently ripping the piss out soy milk, PR, ‘fixies’ and Len Goodman, doing funny stuff about masturbation, bemoaning his relaxed sphincter and explaining why some vegan foods are like anal sex only to discover, in a Sixth Sense sort of a way, that all along he has been expounding a properly serious sociological theory, then come and see this show.

Yapp introduces us to his ‘theme’ at the top of the show, but weaves it into the hour, into his apparently random range of disparate topics, with such a light touch, with such comedic deftness that we forget about it in all the laughter and general enjoyment. So when, at the end, he brings you back to the theme, there is really quite a frisson. To say nothing of an actual moral.

Yapp is a brilliant character comic and, should this be the only show you can see this year, stress not, because he offers up, by way of a comedy appetiser, The Fringe in Five Minutes. He does admit that his portrayal is ‘cruel’. But, to my mind, fair.

It has been, he tells us, seven years since he was last at the Fringe. Please do not let it be another seven before he comes back

Until 28 August. Today 6:50pm.

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