Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

It’s often hard to know how or if impressive social media numbers translate into real world popularity. A straw poll reveals most of Josh Baulf’s audience tonight have taken a punt, rather than knowing him from TikTok, where his videos frequently get more than a million views.

He says he’s disappointed, wanting a crowd who are already on board thanks to knowing him online. But it’s a red flag for the rest of us. Is he one of those ‘content creators’ whose comedy only works for 20 seconds on a phone screen, able to impress algorithms but not in-the-flesh audiences?

Thankfully, no. Baulf’s a robust comic – occasionally taking Route One material, but delivering it with a winning Essex-geezer charm, slightly laddish but never toxic. He acknowledges that a white, working-class male comedian presenting a show called Bulldog is inviting a Jim Davidson crowd, but that’s not him.

His Edinburgh debut is dispatch from a 32-year-old Everyman, now living in East London with his girlfriend, where they’ve started dog-sitting to give them a taste of whether they might soon by ready for children.

Some of his topics are hack, there’s no doubt about that, although no doubt he’d prefer the term ‘relatable’. He mimes out British blokes on the dancefloor, asks ’Ladies, why so many cushions?’ and laments a youth lost to domesticity: ‘We used to do ket, now it’s dinner parties.’

But he’s got fine comic instincts and a strong delivery, natural, friendly, commanding. There’s a great line about unused gym memberships, or the fragility of the younger generation. That nightclub bit actually involves an amusing act-out of men dancing with their pints in hands, and the physicality he brings to a story about a dead guinea pig makes the audience wince.

The routine that closes the show – which runs about 15 minutes short – tells of dealing with the dog in his care getting an unwanted erection, and the inevitably humiliating way he had to deal with it.

It’s typical of his show that anyone au fait with comedy will know how this unfolds, almost to the beat, yet his dynamic telling and vivid re-enactments of every step in the journey keep it fresh.

He admits that being a TikTok celebrity is a ridiculous life for  a man of 32, and this is a confident first step towards the only less marginally ridiculous life of a stand-up.

Review date: 25 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate