Comedy rapper Doc Brown opens with a prank, pretending to be the kind of gold-toothed, macho hip-hop star that Edinburgh audiences would probably hate. It's a killer kick-off, perfectly designed to puncture anxieties about the comedy/rap crossover. And it establishes Brown's likable unique selling point: the mix of hip and aggressive form with bumbling, bathetic content. But its spoof of rap's "me, me, me" self-absorption is a bit rich, at the start of a show about Brown's life, his celebrity friends and his terrible struggle to accept that he isn't famous.
He nearly was. Before becoming a standup, Brown – real name Ben Smith, brother of novelist Zadie – was a promising British rap artist, who toured with record producer Mark Ronson in a band that included Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen. Tonight, we get a slideshow of Brown and his pop-star pals, and some of the material – his recollections of Winehouse's husband-to-be Blake Fielder-Civil, for example – are more gossip than comedy. After this period of near-celebrity, Brown talks us through his ganja-clouded comedown, before drawing a naff moral prioritising "the finer things" in life – eg, his kids – above the quest for fame.
The upside of the autobiographical format is that Brown's show, at least until its pat conclusion, feels from the heart. And his comedy rapping is great fun, from the hymn to his presentation tool of choice, Da OHP, to the section in which he teaches the audience to be a "hype man" – how to join in on every (very predictable) rhyming word. There's also an amusing glossary of rap slang, which translates the likes of "move to me blud and ya click get shank" into gentlemanly English. No need for the status anxiety: if Brown keeps mining this rich seam of hip-hop comedy, his fame should look after itself.
