Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

No one’s going to accuse Aaron Nemo of false advertising. The tagline for his Shitty Mozart act is ‘shitty music, shitty art, shitty jokes’, and he wholeheartedly embraces the cheap DIY aesthetic with crudely drawn cartoons, cheesy gags and only the most rudimentary grasp of his instruments.

Strangely, though, it’s not a ‘lo-fi’ show. It takes Nemo a lot of expensive kit to look this cheap. As well as his laptop, all manner of musical gizmos have been deployed, including an electronic version of the  recorder that’s been hacked to be able to deliver customised heckle put-downs when he blows into it, depending on which note he plays.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t mastered this yet and it takes him an age to unsuccessfully form a coherent sentence in response to an interjection, draining the gig of momentum. This is a perpetual issue with the show, which might be attributed to early-Fringe wrinkles, but I suspect it’s like this all the time, in keeping with the shoddy aesthetic.

But the stop-start nature of the hour prevents it from taking off to become the ribald late-night muckabout it’s striving to be. In individual gags, Nemo is stupidly funny, embracing nothing-is-too-corny zaniness in the same way Tim Vine might. The fact his sketches are so primitive they make South Park look like the Sistine Chapel only adds to the dumb charm.

The brightest tech highlight (a pun if you want it to be) is the  moving-head spotlight he’s cast as his robot sidekick Brightside, able only to speak in the lyrics of the Killers song, which provide several amusingly appropriate comments.

Nemo’s shtick is that he’s a clone of Mozart gone wrong, as the boffins used shonky DNA from the composer’s pubes and produced this runt of negligible talent. Instead of The Marriage of Figaro we get daft, simplistically catchy songs about getting special treatment at the strip club or a Nordic version of Daft Punk teaching us about acceptable racism. We get to meet Randy Newman, Balloon Hitler and Prince Soybean, of the Burger King/Dairy Queen dynasty.  And what he thought rainbows are is as funny as it is troubling.

All these are brilliantly off-the-wall in short doses – viral success online surely beckons, given his vignettes are the perfect TikTok length and come with a strong visual element – but the hour is a stretch for such nonsense, which never quite kicks into a higher gear.

Review date: 4 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House