The Week on Stage at Edinburgh Fringe: Seann Walsh, Mat Ewins, Aliya Kanani, Tarot
A guide to the week’s comedy at Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Seann Walsh: Is Dead. Happy Now? – The Stand ★★★★☆
Seann Walsh says he’s doing well for the first time in a wild four years. He asks us to cast our minds back to 2018. One day, he was competing on Strictly Come Dancing. And then, as you’ll probably remember, a cheating scandal with his dance partner made him into the most-hated man in Britain, with every newspaper branding him a “love rat”. “I could have found Maddie McCann – no one would have given a f***,” he says. He’s probably right.
But Walsh has taken his time and stands before us as a changed man with a comeback comedy hour. Given everything that he’s been through, it would be easy for him to turn his show into a rant against “cancel culture”. But he doesn’t. Instead, he speaks with honesty and humour about what happened, the aftermath and the impact on his mental health. He talks from a place of acceptance, and the comedy is infinitely funnier because of it.
Walsh walks a fine line, knowing when to acknowledge that his behaviour wasn’t great, but also when the reaction to it was unjustified. He’s hyper-aware of just how silly the words “I went on Strictly Come Dancing and got post-traumatic disorder” are, so repeats them on a loop. But he doesn’t downplay the effect it had on him. One routine about a suicide attempt is Walsh at his most-Walsh: dark, yet incredibly witty.
It’s the Strictly chat that’ll likely get people coming to see him, but the best material is actually unrelated and focuses on his father’s heroin addiction. Hearing Walsh discuss how this was a normal part of life growing up makes for intriguing subject matter. When he points out that other comics can’t do this material in their set and then impersonates Michael McIntyre doing an impression about his dad shooting up, he strikes comedy gold.
Mat Ewins: Danger Money – Just The Tonic at The Caves ★★★★★
When TikTok or YouTube comedians play their funniest clips in their Edinburgh Fringe shows, it feels like an admission that they’re funnier online than in real life. As a result, the two giant on-stage TV screens that greet us, bearing Mat Ewins’s name, don’t fill me with confidence. But when Ewins bursts into the room with his head in a cardboard box, live-streaming his face to those screens, it’s clear that this video-based show is very, very different.
These multimedia extravaganzas are Ewins’s forte. He doesn’t post his videos online, meaning the world outside of the Fringe struggles to know what to do with him. He keeps being rejected by Sky and is here with a pitch for a new game show called Danger Money. It involves live video games played by the audience for a 20p cash prize.
It’s easy to focus on the tech elements in Ewins’s show because they are so singular, but there’s no denying that the star is Ewins himself. Unlike with those YouTube comedians, these videos feel fresh, new and totally bizarre. AI porn of himself? A sarcastic lab rat? His cancellable rap album Stock Check at the Pussy Warehouse? In Danger Money, all of these strange ideas appear in video form. Trust me – you won’t see anything like this at the Fringe.
Aliya Kanani: Where You From, From? – Just The Tonic ★★☆☆☆
Aliya Kanani has a fascinating back-story. As her poster declares, she’s lived in 30 countries, attended 10 schools and speaks six languages. Her 10 years spent working as a flight attendant taught her the charm and ability to talk to strangers – just what she needed to do stand-up comedy. On stage, she is warm and likeable, but the material fails to match up to Kanani’s charisma.
Identity, understandably, makes up a large part of the Canadian comedian’s show. She discusses “the thrill of trying to travel with my Muslim name”, joking that airport security’s “random” checks are really just a game of “eenie, meenie, miny, Mo-hammed”. There’s potential in material about dating women after her 10-year relationship came to an end, only for her to realise: “I’m not queer, I’m just a narcissist. They all look like me.”
That stuff is interesting, but many of the other routines border on generic; jokes about misogyny in hip-hop and learning to masturbate feel like they’ve been done many times before. Every line is delivered with a winning smile, but an Edinburgh audience needs comedy with more bite.
Tarot: Cautionary Tales – Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★☆
Tarot appear on stage as a sketch group possessed. The trio look like something out of a horror movie, scuttling around the stage, convulsing in matching white nightgowns with red paint under their eyes. Adam Drake (also known as comedian Goose) smears three pentagrams in blood onto a sheet that looks convincingly like skin. “Three stars from The Guardian,” he explains. Ba-dum-tss.
That’s the kind of luxuriously silly rug-pull that you can expect from a Tarot show. Drake, Ed Easton and Kath Hughes make up the group, the latter joking she’s only there because “the guys needed a woman and I’m cheaper than a wig”. Sketch comedy, they tell us, isn’t the cool experience it once was. Still, it keeps them feeling young despite being in their thirties – after all, “thanks to sketch, Kath has the bank balance of a 16-year-old”.
As the title – and their outfits and slowly melting make-up – suggests, Cautionary Tales sees Tarot find humour within the creepy. In one routine, an actor with low self-esteem gives spooky vampire tours while crying; in another, a priest is accosted by a flirtatious churchgoer, who strokes his arm and asks if there’s “a Mrs Holy Ghost”. A game of “never have I ever” descends to sombre depths, while a Birds Eye commercial gone wrong is one of the weirdest, yet funniest things I’ve seen all Fringe.
Tarot aren’t afraid to make each other break with laughter and regularly crack up throughout the show. In other comedians, it might be pretty annoying, but Tarot are so genuinely hilarious you can’t help being swept along with it.
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