Comedy Reviews
Review - The Skinny.co.uk
Holly Burn, Joz Norris and Ben Target represent London's alternative comedy scene at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.
The beauty of London’s comedy scene is its more than healthy alternative pocket, which keeps great swathes of well-thought-of Edinburgh acts in paying gigs all year round. Attracting the quirky and avant-garde thinkers from around the country, those too strange or delicate to make it on the cut throat club circuit, head the way of Dick Whittington to the warm bosom of the The Invisible Dot and Weirdos Collective. Holly Burn is a Newcastle native who now calls London home for her carefully constructed character comedy. For this particular Edinburgh Fringe she has brought another section of her psyche with I am Kirsty K [★★☆☆☆]. Playing an excitable Geordie teenager who has gathered the crowd together for her nan’s funeral, she picks out members of the audience to be members of the mourning party. It’s an original way of staging a show but unfortunately the caricature of a working class girl who misses her nan is a little two-dimensional, with shouting being no substitute for characterisation. It’s a shame because Burn can write masterfully, but the whole thing feels like it could have used a few personas other than the ethereal presence of a disembodied promiscuous nan.
A common collaborator with the aforementioned alternative comedy group Weirdos Collective, Joz Norris seems like a children's teacher who has been put in charge of some adults for once. Which is not an insult – Norris’s show Hey Guys [★★★☆☆] is a collection of strange thoughts, half ideas and audience participation. The kind of show that would amaze if it was happening in a more intimate setting, but the cavernous hall of The Hive is a reminder that this show is not quite ready for this amount of exposure. There is gold in some of his material and he can craft a great joke: a section on Subway and The Shawshank Redemption is also inspired, but the hour is loosely strung together by the idea that life as an artist is tough. This is only really punctuated by Norris’ whole act, not in the material put forth.