Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Stuart Laws is experimenting with being vulnerable in a way he’s not done before. And because he’s as considerate, clever and cautious as he is silly, he’s got a cold-water metaphor to let us know how deep we’re going.

Dipping our toes or heading in as far as our ankles is safe enough, but he’ll warn us when going deeper threatens to attack more sensitive parts of the body. And (if he’ll forgive me for splashing about with his analogy), he’ll also do a fair bit of dashing in and out of the water as we all get used to how it feels.

The journey is a swirl of delicious flights of fancy and outright lies. The former are typical of the sorts of jewels we’ve come to expect from Laws, from dovetailing jokes about cheating on a partner and in board games, to surrealist visions of geese in unexpected positions (nice), all seasoned with regular sprinklings of deliberate mispronunciations.

As for the lies, well, this is where things get really interesting. At the top of the show Laws is talking with joy about how much his wife makes him feel supported and edified, and how much they laugh together. After sharing cute examples of some of the japes they get up to he pulls the rug up from under us – and not for the first time in this gorgeous hour.

Laws is usually very private on stage, you see, but he’s using these playful devices to make two important, and very personal, revelations. The first is the fact that he’s had a vasectomy – a topic that (ironically enough) provides  fertile ground for vivid and excellent material as well as drawing us in deeper regarding his reasons why, as well as the implications for potential life partners. How early on do you tell someone something this huge?

The second is the concept of long grief, something he’s getting his head around, several years after the death of his father. It’s an unpredictable burden that you carry with you always – naturally, he has an unforgettable metaphor for this too – and it has to be acknowledged.

It’s never mawkish, and there’s a real sense that it’s a big deal to be sharing these moments, these fruits of thinking – always thinking.

But, just as his dad used beer mats to distract him from uncomfortable realities while he was a kid, Laws uses his unique comic mind to keep us laughing, and we might not even realise until afterwards what a profound and sophisticated show he’s created. 

Review date: 23 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Ashley Davies
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)