Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

In one of the most adverse rooms of the Fringe, Canadian comic Cobin Millage has become an expert at battling the conditions of his space. The Three Sisters’ Wee Room is a mid-sized karaoke booth with room for about 15 people to sit around the edges and a bench in the middle. There’s no proper lighting and occasionally customers of the bar will peer through the porthole or physically enter the tiny room looking for the toilet.

Millage, a Canadian performer now based in Edinburgh, has the chops to handle the lack of space and atmosphere, although aside from the room itself, I don’t think his show is as weird as he says it is. 

He’s clearly a good club comic, trading off some of that natural North American brashness for material that often feels confident and punchy. However it doesn’t yet seem as if his observations and routines come from a fully coherent or distinctive stage persona, even if most of the routines are pretty good, especially a bit about the absurd role of the emergency backup goalie in the NHL.

Elsewhere, he relies too heavily on the ol’ imaginary conversation format, where he reports both sides of a conversation that almost certainly didn’t happen. It comes back about three or four times, and each time rings a little hollow. The insults he relates and his witty comebacks fall into a hinterland between the creative and the believable.

The weird part of the show, which he hypes up a couple of times, turns out to be a bit of light metastructural twiddling involving an assassin planted in the crowd and the idea of an emergency substitute comedian. 

There are some clever elements here, quite similar to many other audience plant gags you’ll see at the Fringe, but showing a promising ambition. With a better room and maybe more time – he claims he only wrote the show in the few weeks prior to the Fringe after getting a last minute placement – he could probably expand those elements into something with more reach. 

This current show falls slightly short of totally coming together, but it’s only a matter of time.

Review date: 21 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Free Sisters