Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Red Richardson starts his new show by bringing up a handful of his celebrity lookalikes, including Jack Black – but I think he’s doing himself a disservice. Maybe it’s the moustache, but there’s something debonair about his curmudgeonly qualities.

However, he’s in full grub mode for this show, revelling in humankind’s worst qualities as he fishes a used pregnancy test out of the bin with his teeth in a Wetherspoons toilet. 

He structures his show around the 2017 Oxford Circus panic, the stampede among Christmas shoppers triggered by false reports of gunshots that he – and Olly Murs – were caught up in. It proves to be the perfect vehicle for talking about Isis, the Taliban, and the way people’s worst instincts come out as soon as they’re threatened. He gleefully describes a bystander in a ‘Choose Love’ shirt jumping over a fallen woman in his attempt to escape. What’s even better is that the whole thing took place on Black Friday, the nexus of nihilistic commercialism that fascinates this comic.

The only issue with the show’s backbone is how it sits with all the other material he’s got to get through. His slightly less compelling routines about unusual names and being addicted to Instagram dilute the main story when he needs to bounce in and out of his various topics. And although these digressions always have something to enjoy, you can tell Richardson feels happier as the show goes on, the callbacks kick in, and he’s able to bring his full focus to the main story.

In his despairing delivery and the gleeful bleakness he finds in awful events, Richardson could be picking up the torch from Jack Dee. It doesn’t seem like an intentional catchphrase, but he’ll occasionally punctuate the set with a groaned ‘Oh god…’ which really says it all. 

Although he’s prone to robbing the show of its energy, fans of downtrodden pettiness will find plenty to endorse and enjoy, whether he’s commenting, ‘this is shit’ on a video of a Filipino schoolboy singing Wonderwall, or declaring that he doesn’t want his wife to find happiness again after he’s dead.

• Red Richardson: Shots Fired is on at Pleasance Courtyard at 9.55pm

Review date: 12 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard