Phill Jupitus: Stand Down, The Stand, Edinburgh
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Your support makes all the difference.There are moments when I wonder if the air conditioning at The Stand will add undue weight to the already pregnant pauses between some of Phill Jupitus's routines. The Never Mind the Buzzcocks regular hasn't done stand up for 10 years and he admits that he is "feeling his way back in".
When he finds a foothold, though, he also finds a stranglehold on the audience, with fine lines including: "I'm not saying I'm on TV a lot, but during an argument my daughter tried to put me on mute."
Behind the fat and jolly image there has always been a faintly annoyed, even menacing quality to Jupitus, whose first live forays, in the 1980s, were as a performance poet. This may add to the staccato nature of his set, which relies on rather formulaic exercises including a dissection of accents and a division of the audience into age groups before pitching relevant material.
This might seem like stand-up with stabilisers but some of the jokes are superb. In the section about people in their forties – which includes Jupitus, at 49 – the burly comic explains that these years are when parents start to go a bit funny. He cites his own father, who will ring him up every so often and demand: "Do I like cheese?"
To 28 August (0131 558 7272)
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