Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

In space, no one can hear you scream, But you could probably still hear Garrett Millerick’s booming voice delivering his wild, ranty monologues.

He’s now the father of a three-year-old daughter, and if you think that has calmed him any, you’d be wrong. Needs More Space sees him as intense as always whenever he ramps himself up to swivel-eyed street preacher mode.

This show has its origins in his daughter’s daycare, where staff told him the youngster could grow up to be a comedian – every parent’s nightmare. So Millerick rushed to find something to inspire her into greater things.  

That’s how they found themselves in the Science Museum, awed by the relics of the Apollo missions and setting the comic’s industrious mind to thinking about inspiration in general. What prompted John F Kennedy to give his ‘mental’  1962 speech, setting out the goal of putting a man on the Moon within eight years, requiring billions of dollars and as-yet uninvented technologies? Petty one-upmanship with the Russians, that’s all.

By focussing on this historic battle, Millerick’s firepower is aimed at less urgent issues than previously. His diatribes seem more distant compared to previous bitter gripes that affected him directly, though it’s still impressive to witness him in full vein-popping mode.

When he does alight on contemporary matters, his conclusions are not always unique – smartphones are the new valium of the people and help potent lies sweep the world with far greater speed and reach than the boring truth – but they are expressed powerfully.

This, more than his previous shows, feels more like eloquent talking points formidably delivered than out-and-out comedy. The unexpected way his argument twists and turns is impressive, and the audience easily gets caught up in the thrill of his intellectual chase and the elegance of his writing, as well as the sweaty delivery. But as he points out after one diatribe arguing for the nationalisation of football, that’s not the same as having jokes.

Still he remains an iconoclast, as that broadside at the Premier League proves, and he later risks the wrath of any astro-nerds drawn to the show’s content by pouring scorn on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

While acknowledging the race to set foot on the Moon was essentially an international dick-swinging contest, Millerick argues that the billions it cost not wasted as they turned the seemingly imminent Third World War into a cold one. He also concludes that nothing gets achieved without competition. Which sounds like an argument for capitalism, were not a considerable CHUCK of the show dedicated to how he can’t earn enough ‘survival tokens’ to fund all his app subscriptions.

Millerick’s anger becomes tinged with sadness toward the end as he describes the toxic cesspit of the internet likely to dominate his daughter’s life, raising the spectre of a bleak future. That genie’s hard to put back in the bottle, but to address the other existential threat of global military tensions, maybe we need a new space race to enthuse us. Over to you, China.

Review date: 16 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)