Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

With the deliberately ambiguous I Can Make Me Rich – whose benefit is this for, us or his? - Stanley Brooks is a broad yet adaptable spoof of the financial self-help guru, with the flexibility of his morals matched by the capacity of his creator, Lewis Dunn, to think on his feet.

Brooks isn't so grotesque that he isn't recognisable, with greed, rapacious ambition and overweening confidence accounting for the warping. Sure, Henry Ford, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs appear as cold-blooded monsters to us now. But they were inspiring, entrepreneurial visionaries in their day.

The highpoint of the satire comes when Dunn necessarily breaks character, having worked hard to establish it, to reveal that Brooks not only qualified for the audition process of The Apprentice, with his multiple aliases not enough to perturb the producers, but flourished, progressing surprisingly far into Alan Sugar's rat race.

In the retelling, Brooks was ultimately rejected after going for the joke with his insane business pitch. It's titillating to speculate just how far he could have got into the BBC ratings staple if Dunn had just kept things that little bit more believable.

Unlike many character comics though, he isn't too much in the habit of undermining his alter-ego with blatant moments of insecurity, vulnerability or stupidity, trusting that the satire will reveal itself naturally. Mind you, he opens the show by bemoaning the audience turning round to clock his big entrance, arguably torpedoing his authority from the first.

Thereafter, he essentially weaponises crowd work, his enquiries about occupations used to decry the relative lack of ambition and focus, certainly compared to that expressed by Americans.

There are some underlying truths supporting his cynical appraisals of capitalism and manifesting your wealth. But first and foremost, Brooks is a bullshit merchant, the appeal of the character in his relentless spew of meaningless buzzwords and self-improvement models, with Dunn's trump card his willingness to keep things loose around his script and nimbly ad-lib. Like the most corrupted televangelist preacher, Brooks really gets out there, presses the flesh, crosses palms with silver and shares the (modest) rewards with all of his congregation.

Consequently, there's not a great deal of substance to take away from the show. Although isolated, illustrative bits of stand-up that elucidate his message linger somewhat, including an amusing routine flipping traditional sympathies for Peter Pan and Captain Hook. Sporadic diversions into whimsy such as this, presented as cold, hard evidence for say, the primacy of branding, amuse on that basis and afford Brooks more depth.

With this show developed over a decade in the more demanding club comedy environment, Brooks' forceful command of a Fringe crowd is total and there does seem scope to refine the character further, possibly into the prank realm as The Apprentice stunt and a self-published, puff piece magazine that Dunn has distributed around the Fringe – virtually indistinguishable from all the other PR-led publications piled high in venues – seem to suggest.

Certainly though, if he can beef up the stand-up elements with sharper and more original satirical thrusts, in Brooks there's a solid foundation, an identifiable and robust character to build upon.

Review date: 14 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Just The Tonic at The Caves