Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Milo Edwards doesn’t go out of his way to be liked. He has Stewart Lee’s haughtiness, with many punchlines delivered with querulous sarcasm.

He certainly wants you to know he’s smarter than you. There are a couple of references to being a Cambridge graduate, but mainly it’s in his superior manner. And in his writing, the intellectual always trumps the emotional, even when talking about personal events that might appeal more to the heart.

‘Time’ is the nominal theme of the show, broad enough to hang pretty much any routine on to, from the ticking clock of global collapse to the accident of birth that allowed boomers to pick up houses for pocket change. At 29, his best chance of getting on to the property ladder is marrying up, since a tidy inheritance is not on the cards.

The stand-out routine here is all about how personal timescales have become so pliable that you can be a MILF while still living at home launching a blockchain start-up, and Edwards spins ideas off inventive ideas from that premise.

Mortality looms large, and with a typical lack of sentimentality, he dismisses the euphemism ‘passed away’ in favour of a more honest ‘died’. Likewise, eulogies are, in his view, just one-sided propaganda. No wonder he’s accused of harbouring a ‘negative energy’.

Edwards uses the same nihilistic hard-headedness to go into dark areas – killing babies, for instance – but in context and making sure the logic that leads him to his harsh payoffs is impeccable. The punchlines might not be palatable, but you can’t fault his workings-out.

Not all his gags are so strong, and sometimes it’s a triumph of withering attitude as he pours scorn on the likes of environmentalists or the mental health bandwagon, not attacking the core belief but some of the people who surround it.

A regular podcaster (of course he is, he’s a privileged white man in his 20s), Edwards’ stage aloofness is a little alienating. But his take on provocative social structures, sometimes coloured by personal experience, cuts to the chase.

• Milo Edwards: Voicemail is on at Just The Tonic at the Mash House at 4.35pm

Review date: 12 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just the Tonic at The Mash House