Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Amy Mason bosses the comedy of the prosaic.  Her calm, uninflected delivery places her vocally somewhere between EL Wisty and Pam Ayres, which is good company to keep.

It takes poise not to charge about, carrying on with jazz hands and exaggerated vocal dynamics.  Her measured and warm manner is absorbing and holds attention, which allows the material to reveal its humour, rather than bludgeon you into a laugh with a 'boom-tish' clowny presentation.

This show falls into the comedy genre of ‘my mature personal development story’, which now seems more dominant than the traditional ‘let me entertain you’ stand-up comedy in the one-hour format.  

The great thing is that Mason's deceptively simple style is finely honed, studded with unstrained callbacks and enviable turns of phrase which should enter the national lexicon. She can put a story together, develop it, populate it and keep it believable, wry and amusing.

She is unsentimental, unindulgent (where others might have indulged shamelessly), humane and genuinely vulnerable.  Mason is open about the grind and indignity of having naïvely plain-speaking children, being good enough, coping with and achieving a dignified, respectful divorce, coming out to a husband, parents, friends and children and coping with her hard-won freedom to discover if it is all it’s cracked up to be. 

To be sure, the mental health/neurodivergence box is checked, as in practically every show. I just wanted to cheer because it’s not ADHD in this one.  These days, none of this is novel in the one-hour comedy festival format, but Mason endears herself to an audience with her restraint and skill in telling her story. By the end you want her as a new best friend. 

Review date: 2 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard