Review by Steve Bennett

As a fortysomething man, I’m three times the average age of this audience, notably more male, and 99.9 per cent less shrieky. Judging by her fan base, YouTube star Miranda Sings is the One Direction of comedy.

Deafening, glass-shattering squalls greet the ‘hello Scotland’, her kicking her shoes off, the appearance of a bubble machine, the name of a person from her world that they recognise, the threat of her testing out of character… For many of the ‘Mirfandas’ in the excitable crowd, this is not about the performer but about themselves. They want to tell their friends they were there. They film the show on dozens of phones, sanctioned by the performer, sometimes taking selfies, compiling low-res proof of the experience.

The woman behind Miranda, Colleen Ballinger, first takes to the stage amid this cacophony as herself, a reminder that behind the pinned-back hair and carelessly applied lipstick is a real woman, and one who can sing, as well. For Miranda has a voice like silk. Silk that has been doused in vinegar and run over an open wound.

She, of course, is oblivious to this. Convinced she is a major talent she releases hundreds of off-key YouTube videos into the world, attracting predictable torrents of illiterate abuse. Ballinger has compared what she does to Andy Kaufman, deliberately irritating those who can’t see that this is a character, not another deluded, hopeless wannabe.

Her catchphrase is ‘back off haters’ – she has it sewn into the back of her sweatpants – and a chunky section of the show is dedicated to reading out some of the hateful comments, something many comics have done before – not that this young crowd would know, everything’s new to them.

When reading out the abuse in her nasal whine, Miranda self-censors the naughty words – even ‘damn’ – to protect young ears. Although the gesture seems empty when the screen grab she displays contains the f-bombs in full. There’s a section, too, on porn – it maybe entirely tongue-in-cheek she as much as slut-shames a young teenager she gets on stage, just for wearing a sleeveless dress – and talk off her dodgy uncle has definite paedophile undertones. It seems inappropriate when you’ve just invited an eight-year-old on stage to show off the singing technique, especially as Miranda's usual shtick is to be wholesome and conservative, including singing cleaned-up versions of the more X-rated hits, such as I Like Big… Bird And I Cannot Lie. There’s a nice parodic wit to this, and her malapropism-spouting character is appealingly awful.

She offers a rewritten version of Chicago’s Cell Block Tango, among others, and recreations of videos such as Wrecking Ball (and,yes, 1D’s Best Song Ever) but on a budget. Between the songs she leads us through self-help sections, reflecting other of her online videos that give tips on everything from tweaking to babysitting. Here she teaches the youngsters about porn, love, bullies, and ‘self-isteam’.

It has a certain low-rent charm, and occasionally over the hour there’s a wry gag, but it’s not sharp enough to make Miranda Sings a crossover hit beyond her existing demographic. But with more than 170million YouTube views to date, she’ll not be losing much sleep over that.

Review date: 15 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Venue150 at EICC