Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Eryn Tett Finds her Audience

Star rating: 3.5 stars

It says so right there in the title: Eryn Tett is on a mission to find her audience. Feeling as if she is faced with two career paths – to go mainstream or do her own thing – she commits fully to the road less travelled. If she’s going to succeed, she needs to scientifically identify her perfect target audience, one person at a time. That’s the set-up for this absorbing show that’s part gig, part focus group.

Tett performs the quirkiest of stand-up sets, a series of surreal and absurdist one-liners, observations and impressions. She then attempts to sketch a heat map of audience response on a flip-chart.

 No one know what the scale of measurement is, but today it seems to be based on the cooking of meat. Most responses are somewhere between medium and well-done. ‘What was your least favourite joke?’ is not a question most comedians ask of their audience, especially not when they actually mean it.

Sadly, few of today’s crowd seemed to know what to expect or what was happening a lot of the time, which made the gig an uphill battle. Fortunately, audience bemusement and bafflement seems to be all part of the research, and Tett doesn’t mind if an audience doesn’t understand a particular joke. Maybe they’ll get the next one. 

Then the whole experiment is repeated a second time, with Tett seeming to get wilfully obtuse, partly for her own amusement, and partly to keep pushing the audience to see where the laughs stop and the blank faces start. Another round of meat-based scores follows. We are deep in ‘show within a show’ territory here, constantly deconstructing and teasing the audience based on their responses to every joke.

It’s a bit of a high-wire act, but Tett remains unfazed by a largely unresponsive audience and has great fun testing our patience. She might not be troubling the mainstream anytime soon, but with a show this smart she will surely find enough of an audience to move up to the next level.

• Eryn Tett Finds her Audience is on at Just the Tonic at The Tron at 5pm

Review date: 23 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Matt Carwardine-Palmer
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron)