Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

He won’t like me saying this, but Mat Ewins is an artist and a pioneer. For many years, he’s worked in a unique style of live multimedia comedy in which he plays the straight man to his own creations: video stunts, animations and even playable video games, pouring hundreds of hours into two-second jokes that go off like a thunderclap.

His latest hour is essentially more of the same gold, although he’s hit on a gameshow idea that provides a lovely context for the challenges and allows him to wear a sparkly suit. The room is divided into two teams and forced to compete against the other in heavily rigged challenges for a grand cash prize that could potentially amount to more than £7. 

Rounds include a karaoke singalong in which one team get a hilariously unfair advantage, a robbery roleplay featuring Phil Ellis as a jeweller with a CCTV camera strapped to the back of his head, and a Time Crisis-style shooting game in which participants can shoot up the interior of Ewins’ house. 

It’s worth pausing there and taking stock – none of these jokes lasts more than a couple of minutes, but Ewins has designed a functional arcade game in which you can use laser guns to shoot at objects on the projector screen and the video responds in real time. And that’s just one of what must be 60 or more such tricks in the show. When most comedians are still getting the hang of PowerPoint, that’s an absolutely incredible amount of work to just CHUCK into the middle of a live show. 

The hit rate is astounding as well – there’s literally nothing here that isn’t funny.

And he always just brushes it off. His stage persona has always felt very real to me – a perfectionist who surrounds himself with a million and one things that could go wrong at any time and then goes into conniptions when things start to fall apart. Its honesty is a valuable part of the Ewins experience, but it’s also nice to see him in this more shiny floor mode with some deserved confidence in the brilliance of his videos. He takes particular delight this year in a series of videos he’s made that show the now world-famous Richard Gadd lusting after dogs in the street.

The rhythm of his shows can be unusual, in that they sometimes segue between high-impact moments without working out how each one concludes. Take one of the ending sections, in which an audience member is tasked with piloting a cardboard helicopter through a ludicrous and hilarious scenario that I won’t spoil here. The joke is almost 100 per cent front-loaded. The gag reveals itself, everyone loves it, and then you’ve got 20 seconds or so where confusion reigns until we move on to the next one.

Ewins is almost single-handedly pushing back the frontiers of an artform, and that can’t be easy. But there are still places to go with this when thinking about the arc of the participatory bits. 

None of that takes away from his achievements, though. As always, he’s up there with the absolute funniest and most mindbending hours of the festival.

Review date: 22 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club