At the beginning of the second stand-up act, Carol Tobin comes on stage and says: ‘Laugh. If I don’t make you laugh, think of something in the past that has made you laugh before, and if you don’t laugh, I’ll cry’. There is a lot of thinking about past memories in this show.
Three stand-up comedians, together in a performance just because they are Irish (and seem to drink a bottle of beer each on stage) try to entertain you in this one hour piece, but hard as they try, they are simply not funny. At all.
While Colum McDonnell does engage with the audience and there seems to be something of a spark (which blows out pretty quickly), he is the best of a bad bunch. Carol Tobin just talks on and on, with no direction or sense whatsoever, and stiff as a pole. She doesn’t interact, she doesn’t deliver punch lines, she doesn’t create tension. She is just there.
But it’s got to be John Lynn, with his monotonous rambling about being a teacher, and then his unfunny and patronising impersonation of a drunk ex-girlfriend, who turns this show from bad to the worst there is in the Fringe concerning stand-up.
This is more laugh an hour than laugh a minute, and inserting a swearword every two words doesn’t make great comedy.
At the end John apologises and says: ‘If you didn’t like it [···] understand us, we are still young’. Being young is no excuse for being bad, or treating your audience like morons. Avoid. Spend your money in a chippie. It will do you less harm.
1/5
Adrian G. Velazquez
