Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

‘I’m aware that I’m trying to create a sense of romance in a room where if you put your bag on the floor it’ll catch an STI…’ Such is the challenge facing Mock the Week’s Tiff Stevenson, who’s married now, and attempting to bring that sense of floral-tinted harmony to The Hive, a slightly grotty Edinburgh nightclub more used to witnessing the horny initial stages of courtship.

That’s the mode of thinking in Stevenson’s latest show, Husband Material, where she reflects on married life and the fact she’s in her 40s (the audience are encouraged to be shocked by this fact). If dispatches from newly-wedded life doesn’t sound like your ideal premise for an hour of stand-up, it’s worth holding off judgement, for reasons we’ll come to in a second.

Previously the only problem I had with Stevenson’s comedy - and it’s admittedly going back a few years now - is that it tended to consist of jokes, good though they were, that you’d largely be able to read by logging onto Twitter anyway. 

A pleasure, then, to discover that’s far from the case nowadays. For one, it’s more storytelling-based, mixed in with relatable observational material, some social commentary and a dash of politics.

There’s no shortage of comedians doing relatable material elsewhere in town, though - and this could in part be due to the fact that relatively few of them are women over 40 - you now get a high degree of original comic thinking from Stevenson. 

Original yet relatable material is the gold dust many comedians are hunting for, so its presence here shouldn’t be underappreciated. Even committed Fringe-goers are unlikely to have seen the thorny topic of handbag size inflation tackled before.

Over the course of an hour, very little flops. She’s even skilled enough to make a relatively-mundane story - about visiting a gas station in America - sparkle. 

I’d be keen to see her writing elsewhere, perhaps given a relatable 40-something newspaper column (she’d be better at it than, to pluck a random example out of the air, Adrian Chiles). But here, with ample original thinking and routine after routine landing where it needs to, you’d have to call it a charming success.

Review date: 9 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Mark Muldoon