Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Caitlin Cook hasn’t so much written this show as curated it – collecting examples of witty graffiti from toilet stalls and setting them to music.

Her argument is that such scrawlings are the purest form of art, done for neither critical acclaim nor financial reward. Art she has now taken and charged a ticket price to experience in the hope of getting personal recognition.

It’s odd to have built a show entirely on such found material since almost every laugh she gets has been written by an anonymous other person. A few of these you might have seen online already, but she’s gone deep to find a lot of examples, as she has been collecting them since doing a dissertation on the topic at Oxford. Really. She posits that they are the natural successors to cave paintings.

Her contribution is to thematically collate the material and compose songs around them. She groups examples under categories such as stoner humour or examples of male swagger. Cook – an LA-born, New York-based comic - is a useful songwriter, penning some upbeat tracks that give the messages a solid comic cadence. Someone (possibly Cook herself) even conveniently scribbled some Usher lyrics on a stall wall to give her a lyrical hook for one song.

There are some theatrical trappings, too, starting with a cheesy, over-hyped – and very American – intro that seems out of place in such a small room. That the venue is supposed to represent the intimacy of a dive-bar toilet is more appropriate. In her chat between numbers, Cook imagines the regular drinkers, shares a mime joint and chats about how she loves casual encounters with other women, often at their most emotionally vulnerable, in such places.

This is pleasing scene-setting, and Cook is a friendly host, but the jokes are all in the graffiti – toilet humour in a literal meaning of the phrase. And she concludes that the bathroom scrawlings that gave her a laugh were ‘there when she needed it’, unlike the world’s great works of art.

It’s a bit of a stretch to put such significance on idle doodling, but you can’t accuse Cook of not committing to her premise – and the lines she collected are witty, silly and childishly crude, in various measures.

• Caitlin Cook: The Writing on the Stall is on at Underbelly Bristo Square at 5.45pm

Review date: 19 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett