Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

There’s really no topping Ashley Haden’s description of himself as a ‘dark, bleak, uncomfortable, political comedian’.

Before he gets into the rough ride of his brutal material, he warns his audience: ‘If you have happy memories, do try to hold on to them…. hope is an illusion, reality is pain.’

His pugnacious delivery has echoes of the late Ian Cognito, with vicious gags that punch hard, delivered with an air of unpredictable foreboding.

He’s also been likened to Frankie Boyle, though his nihilism makes the Glaswegian appear to sparkle with joie de vivre. Haden’s jokes are less artful, more brutish and blunt, if you can envisage such a thing. 

You laugh because he makes things sound so grim, that’s the only sane response, rather than in admiration of an elegantly crafted punchline. This said, he does come out with the occasional classy gag, which he claims shows he can write them, but it seems he would rather not offer us that easy release from the harsh truth.

We start relatively soft with a few icebreakers about the election campaign – Ed Davey’s publicity stunts and Rishi Sunak doing a prescient press conference in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter – but this, aptly enough, is the tip of the iceberg. 

Though driven by a fiery passion, Haden’s material is also well-researched. Tackling the far-right’s ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory, he delves deep into birth rates and the economic consequence of an ageing population. Jokes come at the expense of older audience members, but the comedy plays second fiddle to the political impetus.

That’s especially true in a substantial joke-light section towards the end, calling for more wealth taxes over income taxes, which plays like a paper from the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank but with more C-bombs.

Haden will wade into the Israeli-Palestine conflict, after making great strides to separate attacking the Netanyahu government from criticism of Jewish people – even he doesn’t really want to be cancelled if he can help it. Then he turns his eye toward food banks, terrorism and female genital mutilation with no care for your sensibilities. 

A bit about plastic contamination gets a bit garbled in the telling, but other than this, his directness and power of his unbridled cynicism proves an irresistible force. It’s ugly comedy for an ugly world.

Review date: 20 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Counting House