Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Many shows this Fringe are about ADHD to a greater or lesser degree, but few comedians harness the frenetic activity of their minds quite as comprehensively as Ted Hill.

He has become obsessed with American Presidents, voraciously devouring every fact he can find about them. This debut is his multimedia bid to set a Guinness World Record for mentioning as many POTUSes as possible in a comedy show. I wasn’t keeping tally, but he may well have done all 45 of them, even if some, like poor Andrew Jackson, got only the most fleeting of references, just to give Hill more time to concentrate on just how hot Gerald Ford was.

His dedication to his subject and inherent nerdy instincts led him to create all manner of nonsensical graphs, seeking patterns where there are none. He even programs an AI to generate names of possible future presidents, an endeavour that took him days for less than two minutes of material, half of which is about how long he spent on it. Indeed, it’s the disproportionate effort he’s put in – rather than the futile results – that’s often the joke. 

The frenetic pace means some fine factual nuggets such as Lyndon B. Johnson’s problematic behaviours are given the same weight as utter nonsense, whether urban myth, conspiracy theory or just the fruits of Hill's own mad endeavours. It would be nice if the stronger themes had been given more room to breathe, but that would be to deny the workings of Hill’s naturally overactive brain.

It transpires that there is method behind Hill’s madness, too – a reason to keep himself busy and distracted that’s encapsulated by Teddy Roosevelt’s quote about depression, that ‘black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough’.

Amid his firehose of trivia, Hill even manages to squeeze in a few silly, non-presidential asides, such has his beef with Nato over their ‘too easy’ phonetic alphabet and an astonishing fact about a Sesame Street character that will have audience members reaching for Google for confirmation straight after the show.

All The Presidents Man might be an over-stuffed mish-mash of the facts, the fatuous and the funny – but it is also a bigly entertaining insight into hyperactivity.

• Ted Hill: All The Presidents Man is on at Just The Tonic at The Mash House at 6.40pm

Review date: 25 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just the Tonic at The Mash House