Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Jody Kamali’s ironing board romance sketch was by some distance the standout of last year’s character and prop comedy show he performed at the depleted Fringe.

Whether by inspired imagination or fluke, there’s something about an ironing board in a wig with rubber gloves as hands that exists in an uncanny valley of looking enough like a woman while still obviously being a household object to serve a brief double-hander, with the expressive Kamali as her passionate wooer.

Yet whether the comic and seven such ironing boards can sustain an hour-long, largely dialogue-free movie spoof, which morphs from romcom to melodrama to revenge thriller, is very much the challenge he’s set himself.

Taking the stage in his base costume of pyjamas, Kamali comes out to suggest that the idea for the show came 12 years ago, when watching television late at night, he glanced across at his ironing board and saw a woman. Who among us hasn’t ever been so lonely that we can’t empathise? So was born a fantasy which he initially presents as a ‘trailer’, complete with all the usual Hollywood hard-sell bombast.

Though the main story scarcely needs topicality, Kamali has set it in the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, useful for a plot point later on. Meeting him as he bustles about in his routine, going to work and preparing for a date, exposition is achieved through news bulletins on the radio and the rather old-fashioned device of answerphone messages.

Adhering to decades of celluloid cliché, Kamali’s amusingly named protagonist, Jeremy Irons, locks eyes with a stranger on the underground and thus begins a whirlwind romance rendered in montage, the character puppyishly infatuated with his metal beloved. The fact that she can’t move without Kamali guiding and repositioning her only adds to the low-tech, rudimentary charm.

In truth, though, Ironing Board Man is less a prop comedy than a sound cue one, with responsibility for the mood delegated to familiar songs and occasional snatches of classic film dialogue. Kamali doesn’t get too inventive in this regard, with his day at the office soundtracked by Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, a night out clubbing with Underworld’s Born Slippy.

An effective shorthand, it nevertheless feels like outright theft when he also purloins the faked orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally and Liam Neeson’s revenge speech from Taken, not least because he’s tracing similar plot trajectories. The songs tend to end abruptly too, less for reasons of editing, you suspect, than swerving the need to pay royalties if they play out too long.

Elsewhere, Kamali has engaged Fringe royalty Arthur Smith to voice the vicar at his lovebirds’ wedding. And his movie magpie appropriation is so excessive, you come to admire the cheeky chutzpah of it. Because it’s unquestionably entertaining to witness the contrivance as Kamali struggles to recreate scenes from Titanic, clownishly rearranging his ironing boards like deckchairs, nailing the parody.

The show really starts to run out of steam when it turns into a vengeance saga and starts sending up the slow-motion fight scenes of The Matrix. But it’s a pleasant surprise to realise just how far Kamali has taken this harmless silliness, his absolute commitment to his nonsense leaving him thoroughly soaked with perspiration. 

There are funnier, cleverer and more artistically satisfying shows at this festival. But very few so fully devoted to their core concept.

• Jody Kamali: Ironing Board Man is on at Assembly George Square at 2.40pm.

Review date: 11 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Assembly George Square