Absurdism-gone-haywire won the 2015 Edinburgh comedy award for her fellow Australian Sam Simmons, and now Demi Lardner is in the running for a show cut from similarly zany plaid. You never know what’s coming next in Ditch Witch 800, a fizzing 50 minutes of sketches, doodles, one-liners, daft dances and out-of-nowhere jingles. One oddity tumbles on top of another, each animated with hyperactive thrust by the 25-year-old – and underpinned by fine writing.
It’s an unstable audience experience, as her Tasmanian-devil energy refuses to confine itself to the stage. But there’s no harm done: this is about celebrating the arbitrary together (“You paid to get in!”), and Lardner – a wild-eyed cross between elf and punk – delivers the whole show through suppressed laughter at the thought she’s getting away with it.
You won’t feel swindled. Of course, in the deluge of mini-skits and did-I-just-see-that? fragments, some are only making up the numbers. But usually this is high-level nonsense. The slide show on new ways to hold a cup is precious; likewise her dance to a Macarena that forever withholds its climax.
There’s a witch that curses us (“From now on, all your shits are caesareans …”), a home video revealing her dad’s randy priorities, and a penitent confession from a man who ate the soap in a branch of Lush. The show doesn’t surmount the biggest challenge for this type of work: it’s only ever a series of unrelated moments that doesn’t build momentum and ends arbitrarily. But among those moments are some of the funniest on the fringe. Lardner has a confidence and explosive vitality all of her own.
• At the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
