Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

How to do a stand-up about being cautious and unexciting, without that also being the mood of the show? That’s a dilemma Jake Baker hasn’t been able to resolve in his fourth Fringe offering.

The premise is that the 34-year-old has never been a rule-breaker, not even having a fake ID like all his teenage mates, as the fear of being caught was too crippling. His older brother, he was the rebellious one.

But the comic starts to question authority at a Christmas gathering when the family cracked open an Alan Turing-themed Monopoly set – which sounds made-up but is a real variation you can get. 

In describing it, Baker muses on its capitalist message and speaks of how no one ever finishes a game of Monopoly, all rather hack. However, he has got a great gag about how a Galileo version might play out, which is definitely original.

For context as to why he’s so mild, he describes growing up relatively privileged in a small, posh North Dorset village known for its elite private school and where the local Tory MP would speak of how he grew up on an estate – but the sort with a carp lake. Another old joke.

His family have run the butcher’s there for 200 years, but in the first flickers of rebellion, Baker turned vegetarian. But true to equivocal form, he’s not that committed to the cause at all.

The sleepy settlement was also the scene of his supposedly Damascene conversion to the power of dissent, stirred when the locals took against plans to build a big Tesco. They even wrote their own protest song.

Inspired by Malcolm X’s opinion that the biggest problem the civil rights movement faced was not the racists, but the moderates who would do nothing, the comic joined them.

The campaign was a success, though Baker isn’t triumphant about it. His unassuming instinct is to play it down to the extent that a show that’s supposed to be about the transformative power of protest comes off as indecisive. And as issues worth fighting for go, this is a pretty minor one, again true to his mild-mannered personality, but a little dull for us.

The louder message is that Baker just wants a quiet life, and Rule Breaker! is quite a long winded way of getting there. He can claim a few amusing routines - such as the idea of rap videos being shot in Travelodges rather than five-star resorts – but there’s little momentum or consistency.

Where do we protest about that?

Review date: 23 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: PBH's Free Fringe @ Canons' Gait