Stevie Martin returns to the Fringe for the first time in five years with the rarified air of an internet comedian. Always marinated in online culture, she was a great candidate to make the jump during the pandemic and found her voice and her audience in a series of great video sketches with Lola-Rose Maxwell. 

So if all that’s going so well, and it seems to suit her, why return to sweating it out in a basement every day? Well, that’s the question that Clout sets out to answer, taking a deconstructionist and very silly dive into the process of making a show and what makes it rewarding.

For Martin, the screen is her comfort zone, and the stage can be scary, but all the metrics, tracking and potential virality of making content for TikTok can sometimes put her in touch with her audience in a way she doesn’t like. It’s a development she spoofs with graphs claiming to track the enjoyment of her show by individual audience members in real time.

The most popular content she’s ever created by far was a four-second video her sister shot of Martin taking her retainer out in a restaurant in Venice; a clip seen by more than 20 million people. Is it possible to derive enjoyment or satisfaction from that kind of success?

Like all good PowerPoint comedians, she loves to stuff her slides with blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em details and running jokes. The extremely loud .wav sound of a metal pipe falling over is always funny, and serves as a useful way to wake up the audience as we pass through the mid-afternoon siesta period. 

The show’s a pretty sure bet, although Martin’s personality sometimes goes missing amid the rapid-fire jokes and popular appeal. You can see a poise and assurance that isn’t finding adequate expression in her low-status stage persona and – I think – a weirder, gnarlier show somewhere in here that would put her creativity towards more striking ends. You certainly can’t fault her for being entertaining, though.