Gig review by Steve Bennett in Montreal

Starting at midnight on a Saturday, this Alternative Show is pretty much the last event of the intensive Just For Laughs festival, and comics and audience alike are flagging.
For ever-fretful host Andy Kindler things not quite landing is all part of his appeal, given that he’s constantly fighting a losing battle against his own self-sabotaging id. 
He gives predominantly dubious jokes the hard sell, then analyses where they went wrong, evoking pretty much the whole history of stand-up comedy to put his battle in context. It’s as if he wants to be an old-school Catskills comic, but the gods cursed him with the awareness of how corny and hack that is. So he’s racked by doubt the minute a punchline leaves his face, and has to share his angsty concern with the audience. It’s excellent industry-insider shtick, if commercially unviable, as he constantly complains.
First up, was Courtney Gilmour, whose very presence on stage is automatically alternative. For she was born with no hands and no right leg below the knee, automatically giving her unique material. As with many disabled comics, there’s an underlying message that she doesn’t want to be treated with pity nor ascribed any default heroism, but it’s subtly conveyed. And while her everyday experiences inform the act, she’s also skilled at using comic techniques to spin a yarn whose humour goes well beyond her missing bits.
Joe List – as seen on Netflix’s recent series of half-hour specials, The Standups – got some great mileage out of being a stickler for accuracy. You could call him OCD,  although the linguistic error in that phrase would be enough to set off his pedantry. The cornerstone of his set was a great piece about the surface area covered by Denver International Airport, that hack old subject…

From OCD to ADD with Emma Willmann, who confessed she was easily distracted. As a routine about leaving porn in the search history of her mum’s computer proved, as it didn’t quite join together as a story. But for most of the set her intense, alpha attitude to material that’s uncompromisingly honest about her sexuality – to the point of being just plain blunt – steamrollered the audience into submission.
If early Woody Allen were to be reincarnated as a millennial lesbian with no filter when it comes to talking about sex, you’d end up with Robby Hoffman, an angsty, exasperated , fast-talking and highly opinionated comic rattling out bitter barbs twelve to the dozen. It’s a bit gruelling to experience, especially so late at night, but her prickly energy and vivid gags are appealing.
She pretty much drained the last of the energy out of the room, leaving little for Solomon Georgio. A comic who immigrated to the States from Ethiopia 25 years ago, he says he’s not just gay but ‘aggressively’ gay. Indeed his upfront, suffer-no-fools attitude gives his routine plenty of confrontational energy, but even that was not enough to cut through the now-sluggish mood that wasn’t conducive to getting his frank material about his sexuality to land. But he’d be worth a shot at a more conventional time for comedy.

Review date: 28 Jul 2019
Reviewed by: