Review by Steve Bennett

Well this is a car crash in slow motion.

Harry Deansway has spent years surrounded by comedy, as editor of defunct comedy magazine The Fix and as promoter, film-maker and director. The intricate knowledge he picked has given him a clear understanding of the sort of comic he does and doesn’t want to be; but unfortunately his first move on to the stage exposes the fact that it isn’t enough. He hasn’t got the performing or writing skills, or more crucially the connection with the audience, needed to pull this off.

He wants to be an anti-comic; the Edward Aczel sort that shuns punchlines and deconstructs the very scaffolding of boring old mainstream stand-up. His opening routine comes with rimshots and a laughter track to deliberately signpost the bad jokes. Then he moves on to mock observational comedy, by stating the bleeding obvious and regurgitating a few tired old tropes in an unemotional deadpan.

The problem with this is twofold, at least. 1) Anti-comedy been done so often before, and usually by timid newbies, that it’s a hackneyed idea itself; and 2) Essentially he is showing that Seinfeld-style observational comedy relies on the skill and personality of the comedian. And by by taking away the skill and personality of the comedian, as he does, you’re left with very little.

There’s an uneasy atmosphere throughout as the audience tries to work out if his underpowered awkward shtick is a bluff. Is this someone who’s funny pretending he isn’t, or a real dud. It’s never resolved, but the fact that laughs – at least laughs of a non-nervous kind –  are thin on the ground is not a good sign.

What Deansway does have is a nice – and very honest and very necessary – line in self-deprecation The very name of the show is based on the notion that he’s going the wrong way about doing comedy. ‘I struggle to get a gig on the open-mic circuit,’ he tells us. His best review was that he was on the cusp of getting a paid booking – a prediction that has yet to come true.

Some people might take this as a sign. If you want tangible evidence of the causes of the credit crunch, look no further than his £30,000 overdraft – yet he has increased his toxic debt with this costly Edinburgh gamble on his future career.

For Deansway is not a man to be swayed by the body of public opinion. Comedy makes him happy, and follow your dreams turns out to be show’s message (original, huh?, though he may be mocking the very familiarity of that idea) – so he’s going for broke. Quite literally.

He uses the format/reality of being desperate entertainer trying to showcase his talents, then doing so badly. He shows us his acting faces; a TV producer character asks him to riff some topical material, and he mutters obvious first thoughts unconvincingly; he does a mini-play about racism, that’s just racist; and he changes the words to a hit song to make them a bit ruder.

All very knowing, but when the joke is that he isn’t funny, it’s very hard to sustain. Still, he’s accidentally developed a dependable catchphrase for the show: ‘Right, you’re not going for it, OK...’

He likes to create confusion, and the suggestion is that this might all be one great meta hoax and Deansway is actually massive talent just pretending to be shit. If so he’s very, very good at pretending.

Review date: 21 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett