Having eschewed nepotism in the past to little profit, Camilla Cleese claims: “It’s now time I shamelessly exploited my last name to see if I can make it work.” And so her new show – or at least, the bill she shares with fellow US comic Steve Hofstetter – is called Produced by John Cleese. It’s isn’t, in the theatrical sense; but Camilla is, in the offspring sense. Shameless, indeed – but the fringe is nothing if not a hustle, and it’s working for Cleese Jr, who has audiences queuing around her George Square block on the strength of her surname alone.
I’m not convinced the 34-year-old has exhausted all the other possibilities of succeeding on her own merits. She might – like thousands of other comics – have brought a full hour to Edinburgh rather than just 20-30 minutes, first in 2014 and again this year. But at least, now as then, they’re drily amusing minutes, as our host deploys for our amusement her gold-digging Californian cynic persona – albeit flecked with a vulnerability that’s presumably real. (Hofstetter later tells us that, on this particular day, Cleese was performing through illness.)
Examples of her “really dark sense of humour, like my dad’s” include routines about the supposed “gift” of childbirth and stealing dogs from blind people. It’s a mite self-conscious, this would-be shocking shtick, as Cleese celebrates traditional gender roles (see the fine punchline to her joke about not wanting to be rescued by a female firefighter) and scorns the idea of the “gender reveal party”. Ending in standard-issue jokes about her height (as she did four years ago), and peppered with crowd-pleasing jokes about her famous dad, Cleese’s half-hour suggests a capable club comedian who’s yet to produce a coherent show.
Hofstetter’s is the stronger set. A self-described “political comedian”, the New Yorker covers redneck boycotts, Nazis in Charlottesville and the time a murder took place in his hotel. His control of pace and tone are a step above Cleese’s, but – at last to UK audiences – Cleese fille is where the action is. They’re queuing for the chance to rubberneck life in a megastar’s shadow, and Cleese is happy to oblige. But as the daddy jokes keep coming, some of them recycled from 2014 (“We’ve got a new child in our family – my new stepmom”), escaping that shadow seems more unlikely than ever.
- At Assembly, George Square, Edinburgh, until 26 August
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
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