Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

What would you do if, on one of the final outings of your late-night Fringe show, there was only one person in the audience – and she was the first reviewer you’ve had in all month?   

Would you give her the option to come back another night (only to find this is her last chance)? Delay the start by a few minutes so you could ask venue staff to bolster the numbers (or, number)? All of the above? Yes, all of the above. I’m glad Stu Murphy couldn’t find a coin to toss on Wednesday because I don’t think the six of us who finally gathered in the Tron basement that night will forget that intimate experience that culminated in a heartfelt standing ovation. The fella stormed it.

Edinburgh-based Murphy has been on the club and improv circuit for long enough to know how to deal with the trickiest of eventualities. Even though he’s past the half century mark, this is his first Edinburgh hour and, while the newness of the format is evident in the slightly wobbly structure and some weaker material, some of his set-pieces are outstanding.

Occasionally sounding a bit like Eddie Izzard, he tells us about the two times he’s gone viral. The first was pre-internet – or ‘analogue viral’ – when the severity of his hayfever in his native England led to a local paper describing him as ‘the boy who’s allergic to Scunthorpe’. Even Noel Edmonds wanted a piece of the action.

The more recent brush with infamy occurred when an audience member took umbrage at something he said while doing a Spontaneous Potter show for adults in Salisbury. I won’t give it away here, but if you search ‘suck my balls Daily Mail’ it’s the number one result on Google. What a legacy.

And although I sometimes resent being made to laugh while a comic says terrible things about their own appearance (I don’t want to enable or participate in bullying!), his increasingly awful similes about what he thinks he looks like are fantastic.

Themes of sex and death allow Murphy to tell a really funny story about a Ouija board, muse upon his own moribund love life – the next person to touch him intimately will be the coroner, he jokes – and make up some lovely, daft stuff about his granny as a sexual pioneer. And I loved the bit about playing extended rock paper scissors with his niece.

If this room had been full, the noisy buggers in the pub upstairs would’ve been given a run for their money.

Review date: 25 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Ashley Davies
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron)