FESTIVAL COMEDY | Reviews
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GRANT BUSE: THE BIRDS AND THE BEATS An energetic and often educational musical comedy hour ●●●●●
Grant Busé’s day job is something of a gift for a comedian looking for material: he teaches sex education and music to kids on the autism spectrum. So he’s definitely not shy about breaking it down about beating off, baby making, butt sex and BDSM. He’s also able to put it skilfully to music, and works his way through beatboxing, acoustic ballads and audience singalongs with help from loop pedals, improvised rhyming and the occasional man-scream. The neurodiverse angle would be a refreshing and underdone
one, so it’s quite disappointing that it doesn’t seem to get enough airtime. Instead he skips past that early on and focuses on the Truth or Dare style of teenage overshares, inviting the crowd in his Gilded Balloon basement, or ‘castle sex dungeon’, to ask him for no-holds-barred details on his own sex life, flicking his shoulder length, blonde curly hair, and very casually mentioning that he’s totally STI free with good stamina, and no stranger to heartbreak.
There are moments like the call and response bits of ‘penis!’
‘vagina!’ that get pretty cringey, and are probably in there to keep the late-night crowds giggling into their pints, but there’s also stuff about animal and insect mating rituals, natural aphrodisiacs and Catholic guilt to keep things more interesting. There’s a safe sex and consent message woven in among his facts and cabaret songs, making for an educational, daft hour that invites the crowd to shout out their secrets while he bounds about the stage like an energetic, uninhibited, one-man Australian version of Flight of the Conchords playing Spin the Bottle in a student flat. (Claire Sawers) ■ Gilded Balloon Teviot, until 27 Aug (not 8, 15), 11.45pm, £9–£10 (£8–£9).
JEN BRISTER: MEANINGLESS Family and toxicity blend in a show that’s far from a let-down ●●●●● QUEEN CUNT: SACRED OR PROFANE? An aimless mess about important stuff ●●●●●
ROB AUTON: THE TALK SHOW A warm and frequently funny hour ●●●●●
Now that LGBT+ performers are thankfully much more visible on the comedy circuit, it would be passé for Jen Brister to discuss her coming out or relationship status. Plus she’s gone into detail on that in past Fringe shows. This year, she’s talking about a fractious relationship with her Spanish mum, who’s been living with Jen, her girlfriend and their twin boys for a lot longer than anyone planned.
Her stories about raising two IVF babies (there’s a bio and a non-bio parent, she explains, a bit like washing powder) are like a London lesbian version of TV show The Letdown, where real talk replaces smug gushing about the miracle of motherhood. She also gets confessional about peri-menopausal rage, and her bursts of pure unleashed, cathartic fury are pretty amazing to watch; particularly when she imagines directing them at the kind of toxic men who wind her up so much.
The patriarchy gets a good, hard shoeing, as does period poverty, austerity and the gender pay gap. Her accents are particularly special, and although she still deals in some gender stereotypes of her own, Brister finds an entertaining way to talk about the trickier sides of family, love and sexism. (Claire Sawers) ■ Monkey Barrel, until 26 Aug (not 15), 1.45pm, £5 in advance or donations at the venue.
60 THE LIST FESTIVAL 8–15 Aug 2018
Queen Cunt is a sketch show combining comedy, drag, song and ‘the grotesque’. A series of scenes play out before a cloth backdrop built to resemble a vagina, and costume changes are filled by projected video clips in which a clitoris addresses the audience. So far, so Fringe.
The show purports to explore issues of consent and sexual assault while challenging the patriarchy; all important subjects which need to be addressed, but not like this. Two men’s rights activists insult womankind and are unable to bring themselves to say the word ‘feminist’ out loud (an exasperated audience member shouts it out after an interminable wait, just to move things along). And two old ladies recreate a porno scene after dragging onstage two members of the crowd who then stand around aimlessly.
Even though one of the two volunteers has spent the entire show drunkenly shouting out pissed-up, insulting nonsense at the performers, his stage-based humiliation still seems like steep penance. It would usually be safe to bet that this is the only show in which a topless performer lactates over the crowd but, well, this is the Fringe. (Murray Robertson) ■ Underbelly Bristo Square, until 26 Aug (not 8, 13, 20), 11.45pm, £9–£10 (£8–£9).
Following on from shows about the colour yellow, the sky, faces, water, sleep and hair, Rob Auton’s latest hour explores the forgotten art of talking. On this, the opening night of his Edinburgh run, he shoots the breeze with audience members, introducing strangers to each other and reacting with childlike wonder upon discovering two separate groups are from the area surrounding Stoke on Trent. His affable disposition and charisma mean he could pull this off for longer than five minutes, but his plans for The Talk Show are greater.
This is an absorbing hour that sits somewhere
between comedy and spoken word. Auton has many strings to his bow as a performer; his voice soothes, his writing is both eloquent and uniquely strange, he can pull off puns and one-liners, but also delivers a poignant piece of short fiction about selling a house on planet earth to aliens. He imagines his parents' first date and it's both touching and bizarre. Despite the philosophical tangents, The Talk Show is still, at its heart, a comedy. A routine that considers what leaves might say (if only they could talk), triggers a prolonged period of laughter, and there are frequent moments of that kind in this warmest of shows. (Craig Angus) ■ Just the Tonic at The Caves, until 26 Aug (not 13), 6.10pm, £5 in advance or donations at the venue.