Review by Paul Fleckney

My first Periscope review YAY! Twisted Canadian stand-up Bobby Mair is the only stand-up to figure out that broadcasting your show live on social media sensation Periscope every day of the Fringe may help build his fanbase (possibly at the expense of actual bums on actual seats). So I found a quiet corner of the Gilded Balloon and tuned in to see how it went…

It didn’t start well when the broadcast didn’t appear to begin until 15 minutes after show time (unless Mair started 15 minutes late then only did about 25 minutes). So key to the endeavour seems to be: start the broadcast when you start the show, otherwise there’s not much point.

Thanks to the Gilded Balloon’s first-class wifi connection, the picture on my knackered old iPhone was pretty good and the reception held up for virtually the whole show. Inevitably, one of the two occasions it dropped was right on the cusp of a punchline. The sound quality is decent enough, but Mair’s a chatty one with the audience, and there’s no picking up any voices from the audience. Meanwhile, on my laptop, the stream didn’t work at all.

The other active agent here is the steady hand of the person holding the phone. In an ideal world it’d be held tight in a cradle, perhaps to the side of the stage, but alas no. But wait – Mair’s holding person did a sterling job, and is clearly one of the top 5 newcomer camera people in the country today. Four stars to whoever that was!

Having only 25 minutes of the show to review isn’t ideal, but it’s clear Mair hasn’t lightened his act of late. There are some deliciously dark jokes about the Make A Wish Foundation, and the unicyclist trapped under a bus who made the news earlier this year.

His forays into more political comedy shows Mair has some depth and isn’t just a shock comic. He follows the argument about Uber not paying taxes to an amusingly odd conclusion, and has a great gag on a 'liberated' friend who claimed to be 'the opposite of a woman in a burka'. But it’s never long before he’s taking great pleasure in the misfortune of someone else, like the lady trying to get a selfie with a monkey who doesn’t want to play ball (maybe he’s right on that one).

So, an experiment definitely worth pursuing, so long as the comic remembers to hit START.

Review date: 18 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: The Hive