Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Rich Spalding is not a comedian bursting with razzle-dazzle. His Fringe debut is a quiet, understated storytelling hour that achieves intimacy but also has its profound ideas slightly hobbled by an unwaveringly subdued delivery.

Gather Your Skeletons is a relatively sombre reflection on life, death, work and relationships – which pretty much covers everything – told poignantly with a wry wit and self-deprecating honesty about his lower ebbs.

It takes the form of anecdotal chapters, each headed by the date it happened, but not in chronological order, giving rise to the notion that all these formative incidents exist simultaneously within him.

The death of his dad is a big one, of course, and he has a dark but perfectly-written gag on the subject. Avowedly not morbid, it is the icebreaker that sets the tone for the hour, tackling serious subjects from a point of view distant enough to make jokes from but still holding sight of the significance of the moment.

Spalding defines himself as cautious, as his restrained delivery surely attests, a man to whom things happen rather than being an active player in his own life. Some people have main character energy, Spalding has ‘unnamed extra who wrangled a single line in their scene’ energy.

At a low, he finds himself working at the West Midlands Safari Park, offering a grim description of just how poorly he was doing in life, donning cheap costumes and answering to a boss still in her teens. No wonder he hates fancy dress parties.

Yet such a gathering was the scene of possibly the best moment of his life when he hit it off with a ‘sexy cobweb’ at a Halloween bash. They ended up dating, his insecurities that she was out of his league amplified by just how hot her exes were.
Meanwhile, he struggles with the abject humiliation of ‘trying to be a comedian’ – a stage no one should be going through if they’ve got their life together.

Spalding loves an extended analogue, whether it’s comparing a delicate vase to a fragile newborn or likening sex to coffee, he’ll push the metaphor as far as it will go, and then a little beyond. And he clings to his belief that Groundhog Day depicts a kind of purgatory, and not just for Bill Murray’s character.

While grief casts a shadow over Gather Your Skeletons, Spalding makes a convincing case that life is not necessarily about the big moments such as the death of a loved one, but finding happiness in the small everyday pleasures of living. 

It’s a quietly uplifting coda to a sensitive and thoughtful hour of well-constructed, introspective comedy.

Review date: 19 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard