Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

She’s a maths buff, but data-scientist stand-up Ginny Horgan’s got her sums wrong in extrapolating what seems like a perfectly serviceable comedy club set about working and dating in male-dominated Silicon Valley into a full hour.

Regression becomes a blow-by-blow account of her life story to a granular detail that doesn’t contribute to anything grander. It’s less a narrative arc than a straight line through her life. As the bad dates and bad decisions mount up, the comedy = therapy equation breaks down, as the left-hand side is increasingly weakened.

Her idea of illustrating some of her points with poorly designed graphs and charts is also a surprising flop, especially given it seems intended as a defining gimmick. Fellow geeks will be irritated by how meaningless they are; non-geeks couldn’t care less. And she has to share her stage with a screen for this?

This aside, her material starts strong enough with some knowing swipes at male chauvinism and her privilege growing up rich and whiter-that-white, which she combines with some nerdy sex gags. Even a cheap dick joke about a bloke not being a mathematician because it definitely wasn’t eight inches can be forgiven, just about.

The eye-opening fact is that she went on 125 first dates in her first year in San Francisco, and that was just the start of a troubling dating history. After she dropped out of her tech job and moved back in with her wealthy mum, she continued these escapades, missing a festoon of red flags (guys into crypto was just the tip of the iceberg). In the show, the jokes start drying up; IRL, she had the opposite problem – drinking too much. She began taking antidepressants, too, for is an Edinburgh show really an Edinburgh show if it doesn’t mention mental health?

It’s here her story – like her life – gets stuck in a rut, with too many familiar yarns, told in too much depth. Personally, things start to turn around for her when she moves to LA, but we are still on the treadmill of introspection, with the audience being: I did this and then I did this and then I did this… All plot, no story. It becomes plodding.

She can write decent jokes, as the first half demonstrated, but once they become thin on the ground, her dry, detached delivery does nothing to lift pedestrian storytelling. The graph of audience interest becomes an exponential decline.

Review date: 15 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot