Brighton Fringe comedy review

Is it mean to call Richard Pulsford a cut-price Tim Vine? Many of his jokes you can virtually hear in the more famous comedian’s voice (‘I said, "I want to buy a van"; he said "camper?"…’) although Pulsford doesn’t lean into the cheesiness quite so much as the king of the dad gag, delivering in a more conversational style.

Fifty minutes can hold a lot of one-liners, and Pulsford doesn’t skimp on the quantity, though the quality is very erratic. A few are gems, a few are groaners, a few you can figure out quite easily if you turn your mind to it and a few involve such convoluted set-ups that they risk losing their structural integrity. Imagine the tortured premise about glazing at a Premier League football club needed for ‘a pane in the Arsenal’ to work as a punchline. (‘Work’ being used in a loose context there).

Pulsford uses Twitter to write, and kicks off with a PowerPoint of some of his more successful tweets of the past few years, one of the many devices he uses to vary the format so it’s not just feedline-punchline-repeat. It works, and he holds the attention without providing any more context than one family-friendly joke after another. About the only personal fact he reveals is that he lives in Fife, and, when it comes to politics, his one Brexit joke is merely a play on the phrase ‘freedom of movement’.

That said, I could definitely have done without the change of his show title to clunky, meaningless soundalikes such as ‘Oort Joke Stellar’ every few minutes. It adds to the feeling that he’s throwing everything into the show, without much editing out of the weaker thoughts - or indeed the occasional gag that sounds too similar to other comics’.

But not for nothing does he regularly make the Dave Joke Of The Fringe lists at Edinburgh, and if short, accessible, inoffensive, silly bits of wordplay are your bag, Pulsford has a plentiful supply.

Review date: 30 May 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton Rotunda Theatre