Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Scottish stand-up Robin Grainger attracted headlines earlier this Fringe for performing to an audience of one – as if that is in any way unusual in Edinburgh.

Even worse just happened to Hollywood screenwriter and Stan Lee protege JD Shapiro. Not only did he perform to a single punter, but that person was a comedy reviewer.

Reader, I was that audient.

He didn’t know my job until after the show, which he was keen to press ahead with even with such a small… well ‘crowd’ seems sarcastic. He recalled the time he performed to only seats at the Los Angeles Comedy Store early in his career. His ‘show must go on’ spirit won over the venue’s fearsome matriarch, Mitzi Shore, and he was accepted into the inner sanctum.

Any discomfort at the weird one-on-one dynamic in this Fringe show was quickly dispelled, however. Shapiro loves sharing his stories – of which there are legion – and has an engaging, friendly, conversational energy. Which is a good job, as never has a gig been such a literal one-sided conversation.

He grew up a ‘scrappy kid from the wrong side of the New Jersey tracks’ who could well have been sucked into gangland life at a very early age. After a brief dalliance with the Criminal underworld he went to Los Angeles to follow his dreams, eventually having them realised with the aid of a dentist – yes, really. The tooth guy helped get Shapiro’s script for what would become Robin Hood: Men In Tights to Mel Brookes.

But that Hollywood dream shattered when Shapiro adapted Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard’s book Battlefield Earth into what would become one of the worst movies of all time. (The ‘aggressively bad’ John Travolta vehicle scores just 3 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes). Shapiro later wrote a newspaper article apologising for his involvement.

His career in Tinseltown has spawned so many anecdotes he cannot possibly cover all of them, So he produces a list of a dozen at the end, from which there’s time to choose only one tonight (it turns out to involve Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin). Earlier in the show he shares how Sir Sean Connery was so close to signing up for what would have been a movie-stealing cameo in Men In Tights – and offers an insight about how the sinister Scientology’s Celebrity Center works.

For anyone interested in the machinations of Hollywood, this should be a must, with Shapiro’s mixture of semi-indiscrete anecdotes and pragmatic insider know-how. And I’m not sure why the Stan Lee link – working together on a number of comic books – hasn’t drawn some Marvel fans to the show.

The script, in the terms of his trade, needs some punching up, as any moves to cram in even more of his candid, loose-lipped anecdotes would be welcome. Props that adorn the stage are never referenced (Chekov would not be happy) while he brings up a love of classical music, never to mention it again. 

He closes the show – which I’m sure would be intimate and affable even if didn’t HAVE to be – with an uplifting final thought that explains why he’s here. Some of the emotion behind it wasn’t seeded in the previous hour, which cost it some impact, but it’s a nice sentiment from a man who’s picked up plenty of experience points from his time working in LA.

• I'm With Stupid is on at Gilded Balloon Teviot at 9pm

Review date: 13 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot