Review by Steve Bennett

The internet has given birth to a new way of developing comedy. It is no longer the preserve of those with the fortitude to go on stage night after night and hone their material, instead the door has opened for a new generation of geeks, able to create videos with some basic software and release it into the world.

That’s what this show feels like – an hour of watching shonky YouTube videos, but in a Fringe venue. McQueen is Jesse Adams and musician Tim Oakley; but the latter couldn’t make it to Edinburgh, so it’s now a one-man production.

Adams sits in the corner, in the dark save for the glow of his MacBook, with an effects mixer and a cheap keyboard in front of him. He’s in a hoodie and his baseball cap shadows his eyes… this does not look like a man who wants to be in the spotlight.

He voices and live-animates some cheap videos. The opener has cut-out heads of Batman, Darth Vader and other genre-film characters in a stupid sketch. It’s not particularly well-written but has bags of nerd-appeal, and sets the low-fi tone for the hour. A repeated sketch involves a chat show hosted by a fox, which contains the best lines and seems to be McQueen’s calling card, while another short film, The Magic Carrot, features a vegetable that can shoot rainbows from his eyes that’s carried around on a dragonfly. That description alone will tell you if this show’s for you.

It wasn’t for me – but half the room were in hysterics.

There’s little to it other than nonsense pseudo-surrealism and the home-made animation style, which seems pretty prevalent online. There is a certain charm, but that only goes so far, and there are a few good lines, too, but the laughs are not built on that. Instead it’s the amateurism and the weirdness, the poor quality of the visuals and the rough celebrity impersonations that delight the subsection who are delighted, rather than a sharp script.

That amateur vibe took a special turn tonight, when one of Adams’s devices ran out of juice, and he sent the technician, then a member of audience, and finally himself, scurrying backstage to find a charger or new batteries, to no avail. Slick it is not.

Comedy Central are making a TV version of this – presumably in the States and presumably in the hope of emulating that Adult Swim style of late-night alternative comedy. There is certainly an audience for this sort of world, but others may quickly lose patience. A real Marmite show

Review date: 10 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome