Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Such is Peter Bazely’s disdain for middle-of-the-road stand-up, dismissed as podcasting about family and relationships while doing routines about your awful wife, that he decries having a daughter, a self-own of his  hackiness that he sarcastically summarises as ‘cool’.

In his tired misanthropy, bordering on complete disinterest for the actual act of stand-up, Bazely is an exemplar of anti-comedy, perpetually false-starting his show with his pottering admin. Routines are eventually teed-up and ticked off like chores and he treats laughter and audience indifference with almost the same incurious shrug. He does, he acknowledges, prefer having a show at the Fringe to actually performing it.

As is fast becoming the way, he suggests that he was unofficially diagnosed as autistic by an audience member last year. Some comics have built entire shows, even careers around their neurodiversity. Yet Bazely presents it as a passing thought, not even a particularly irksome or enlightening one.

The sense that he’s potentially having a breakdown is exacerbated by the disparity between his over-6ft height and the claustrophobic confines of his room, a hellish box from which there’s no escape from his audience. Except that on more than one occasion, he does leave the room, shuts the door and performs in the corridor, offering a rudimentary puppet show or audibly slagging some of those still within.

Performing low-key, opening snatches of songs on his guitar, sardonically introduced as 'classics', they’re either gnomic little nuggets of wit or simply trail away into nothingness, their reception once again almost immaterial.

He does stoke a bit of engagement and unpredictability by handing out cards with pre-prepared heckles on for the audience to deliver at a moment of their choosing. These range from half-hearted expressions of encouragement to mild slams, with set-ups for other Silly Little Bits of business.

The interaction emboldens some in the crowd. And on more than one occasion, Bazely teeters close to losing control. But that suits the show’s flimsy, ramshackle nature, with the definition of what would constitute a successful performance highly subjective.

While evoking his mental health struggles and the prospect of suicide, he never lingers too long in the darkness for it to get truly bleak. And there are some decent, bona fide jokes among all the disassembling and deconstruction. Still, he’ll deliberately drive a routine through the floor if it looks like getting too much traction, sucking the oxygen out of his already airless cage with perverse compulsion.

Confessing a debt to the self-challenging comedy of Stewart Lee, he nevertheless immediately undermines it by asking, and to a tortured extent guessing, the favourite acts of those around him, the import of what’s revealed a meaningless subversion of the idea of influence. 

This nihilistic brand of comedy can’t be for everyone – his room uncomfortably seats less than 20 – but Bazely’s a distinctive act. There’s a glimmer of something inspired in his potential and I look forward to seeing how or if it develops.

Review date: 24 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Free Sisters