Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

With this slippery hour of anti-comedy, almost designed to fail, Nate Kitch takes the guardrails off what stand-up can be. Ignoring the usual contract between comedian and audience, the energy ebbs and flows as expectations of structure or punchlines are abandoned.

People’s reaction to the absence of what they anticipated becomes part of the fabric of the show – though ‘show’ seems too inadequate a word for something so loose. ‘Experience’ might be more on the nose. Some punters get angry, some get bored, some submit to the ever-shifting dynamic just to see where it goes.

The hugely meta hour is presented as if it’s all preamble. It starts as we queue up in the corridor, as Kitch asks if anyone’s brought an extension cable, apparently needing one for the show to start. That he never finds the elusive cable may explain why any formal performance never seems to begin.

Even when we’re seated, the lack of formality encourages members to vocally join in, chatting to the comedian or offering a running audio description of what’s going on to their friends. As if anyone could truly tell what’s going on.

The tricksy Kitch spends far more time talking about how the performance is going than actually performing… though that deconstruction becomes the performance itself.  He’s apparently not used to a sold-out room, as he has tonight, which gives him a lot more reactions to play with.

One couple in the front row seem to be hating it – which is just fine by Kitch. When invited to leave scot-free, they discuss it for a bit, then decide to stay, still apparently unhappy – and apparently continuing the whispered ‘should we stay or should we go?’ debate for the rest of the hour.

It’s as if Kitch is afraid of momentum. Every time we start to get on board he sabotages the gig, taking us somewhere else instead. He’ll gleefully drive the show into the ground on a whim. His material’s often dull, but never boring, as you wonder how this apparent lack of content will play out.

He takes one punter out into the corridor to have a quiet word about her behaviour, chatting to venue staff and other comics as they pass. He suggests invading the show next door but decides against it. 

There are fragments of conventional observational stand-up routines about Thunderbirds, pretentious names of craft beers, or, more esoterically, Kazimir Malevich’s modern artwork Black Square. But he quickly loses confidence and interest. All jokes have been told, Kitch believes, all that is left are ‘bits and beats’, like comedy-writing’s  ‘rule of three’, of which he’s so wearily dismissive.

Nonetheless, a real joke might occasionally be spotted, looking very out of place amid the ruins of the demolished show. Near the end, Kitch briefly delivers a smattering of Tim Key style aperçus, but that too is abandoned to join the debris of orphaned material that comprise the hour. 

It’s a bold performance - few stand-ups are as willing to CHUCK everything into the skip as he is – and the abandonment of all rules makes this an archetypal Fringe show, a unique experience pushing at the edges of what stand-up can be defined as. Even if the results are mixed, they are always interesting. Is this where the cult begins?

Review date: 21 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House