Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Elfin American comic Maeve Press is 20 or 21 years old, but with her slight frame and innocent, vulnerable demeanour, she seems much younger.

Her development has long concerned the experts, and she spent 17 years under special educational observation in New York, charting her issues, physical and mental, as she struggled with simple gym tasks, writing, anxiety and awareness of her surroundings.

But as she became an adult, she was suddenly released from the system and presented with a box of reports from that time, which now sits on the stage with her.

She reads a few of them, dating from when she was a few months old to her discharge, which feels like a solid basis for a show. But she never properly capitalises on that potential of her journey, instead sharing relatively inconsequential stories from her youth, from Irish dancing lessons to seeing clowns on a cruise ship.

Those reports – which she turns into the Failure Confetti of the title via to her nervous release of ripping up paper – are just punctuation. What seems to be the main message, that she is so much more than the terse verdicts on the reports, is thrown away as an aside. However the abrupt change from child to adult does provide a dramatic impetus late on.

Press is a winsome performer, endearing and peppy on stage, but the comedy here is underpowered, with just a smattering of punchlines over the hour. It’s not a good sign that the sharpest routine comes on a video, an early comedy club performance some time after she started stand-up at the age of 11 on a day camp. 

She’s come a long way since, starring in Australian comic Josh Thomas’s US sitcom Everything’s Gonna Be Okay, and she obviously has her eyes on more castings, too.

Press uses Failure Confetti as showcase for her singing skills, no matter how irrelevant the songs are. Especially ending the show with a medley of rewritten songs hailing drag queens and how they slay… a group who have played no part in the narrative up to now.

There’s a good personal story in all this somewhere, and Press is more than engaging enough to tell it, but this version misses the opportunity, and isn’t funny enough for that not to matter.

Review date: 4 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly George Square