Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

The next Joyce Grenfell at the Edinburgh Fringe

<em>Lloyd Evans</em> samples the delights of the Fringe

Coundaisy Wallis

Strict bylaws in Edinburgh prevent you from buying off-licence booze after ten at night. You can, however, buy all the sauce you want from ten in the morning. (This may explain why alcoholism is so rare up here.) When midnight tolls, Festival revellers pour forth and fill the air with chanting and singing of variable aesthetic quality, and the only way to get any peace is to lapse into a Valium coma.

By day I venture forth with sleepy eyes in search of great art. Lee Kern: Bitter Twitter (Gilded Balloon) wants to unmask the superficial malignity of Twitter. His tactic is to tweet silly questions to silly celebs and to recite their silly replies on stage in an angry voice. This doesn’t take us very far. Twitter, posing as social leveller, has simply magnified the gap between watched and watcher. The ‘follower’ tally on every account gives a more accurate gauge of fame than any device yet invented. Jerry Seinfeld skewered it like this: ‘Why say a few things to a lot of people when I can say nothing to everybody?’

Seinfeld’s old chum Al Lubel is at the Fringe. Here’s a typical line. ‘I’m going to talk about something no other comedian talks about. Myself. Because no other comedian talks about Al Lubel.’ In fact, that gag is 20 years old but it might have come from Lubel’s present show (Al Lubel Is Mentally Al, Just the Tonic at the Caves). He’s a cerebral and engaging presence but his offbeat narcissism needs a new flavour.

The Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolfe III is the best comedian I’ve seen who doesn’t have his own chat show. So he’s created his own (Brothers and Sisters…It’s the Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolfe III) at the Gilded Balloon.

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