Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Christian Schulte-Loh lays it all out there in his show title, his third to refer to himself as the ‘50ft German’. In all fairness, he is both unusually tall and moderately German, and most of his comedy plays into one of those two features, manly the latter.

His pitch is that he’s the only funny German, but try telling that to a country in love with Henning Wehn. He’s personable enough to keep this big room on side, although his claims about his height are slightly undermined by the cavernous ballroom ceiling.

Schulte-Loh gets straight into the stuff about national stereotypes relying heavily on gags about punctuality, the supposed lack of a sense of humour, and plenty of allusions to the darker parts of German history. Having laid out his stall, he seems determined to find out the nationality of everyone in the room, to see if he has anything to work with.

He gets a handful of decent laughs throughout, particularly from the older parts of the crowd, but it’s hard to find much of a sense of his personal humour in the material. Jokes are written with a broad brush, as he attempt to bring everyone on side, with several stories contrasting Germany and the UK, always giving the British the last laugh. Do Germans really think Britain has the best sense of humour in the world? Maybe some of them.

The hour is too relaxed to be desperate, but it speaks to his utilitarian attitude to stand-up: stick with the material that’s most likely to go down well with the widest possible audience. It makes sense in its own way: he’s very widely travelled, performing comedy in multiple languages and doing a lot of corporates, so a certain level of blandness is probably inevitable, maybe essential.

Along the way, he hits on a couple of winners. His final anecdote about the old lady gets a good reaction, and a mention of the World Cup suddenly wakes up this sleepy audience like a cattle prod to the neck, but as he points out himself, any ground won is not held for long.

Nothing wrong with aiming to please, but Fringe crowds might find themselves longing for more substance.

• Christian Schulte-Loh: Comeback Of The 50ft German is on at Laughing Horse @ The Counting House at 5.30pm

Review date: 14 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Counting House