Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Making being a misfit relatable is the tacit underpinning of many identity-based stand-up shows, finding that paradoxical sweet spot for gently nudging the dial of what's encompassed by 'normal'.

One long, extended protestation that he's a normal man, doing normal comedy, Ted Hill's 110 Percent Normal is a characteristically dense overload of multimedia stimulation from a comic who struggles to make or maintain eye contact, yet grippingly engages you with his visual and sonic blitz. 

Opening with images and footage from his childhood, intercut with stock library visions of happy family conformity, a miming Hill maintains, in pre-recorded voiceover, that not only is his comedy 'very' normal, but he is 'not autistic'. And it's a measure of both statements' shakiness that when he ultimately drops the daft, contrived pre-record you're surprised it's happened so early.

Manifested as rampaging elephants on the screen, increasingly trampling all over his presentation, the pachyderm in the room of Hill's (undiagnosed) autism is almost ever-present. Yet his ADHD is well represented too, as he races through his laptop-enabled set-pieces, laboriously crafted yet pacily executed, multilayered whizbangery that increasingly starts to interconnect to form an emotional, confessional collage, despite his feigned efforts to dismiss it all as by the by.

Having trained AI bots on Netflix's vast but conceptually narrow library of stand-up and the process of audience banter, Hill highlights the limits of algorithms for prescribing both what is normal and what is good comedy. 

Elsewhere, his trademark quirky graphs spoof the notion of the standard and conventional by emphasising how it's the selectivity and arbitrariness of the data one inputs that produces the results.

He becomes a Dr Frankenstein of sorts, channelling the psychological harm he supposedly still suffers after consuming his twin in the womb to create a stand-up golem from the disparate parts of streaming tastes for edgelord comedy, artificial intelligence and his own darkest fears.

With his admissions of vulnerability, at first fleetingly disclosed as part of the blink-and-you-miss-it meta-commentary he employs, the hour nevertheless begins to clarify in focus and Hill starts to unpack the deeper trauma informing his anxiety.

Slickly done, with any number of funny toppers and callbacks jammed into the double-act that he has with his tech cues, the hyperbolic delivery method is itself the most consistent joke.

Regardless, the interactive elements help sustain a live, in-the-room feel. And for all his professed difficulties in making social connections, the strategies Hill has cultivated to compensate offer refreshing novelty, more so than bog standard stand-up interrogations of the front row. 

Ultimately, while not exactly revelatory, the depth of Hill's childhood pain is still pretty shocking. Official diagnosis notwithstanding, 110 Percent Normal feels like a watershed hour for a comic almost fully freed to be himself.

Review date: 10 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Assembly George Square