Misery loves comedy, they say. But recent years have seen a rise in standup that flouts that idea, insisting on humour with neither victims nor a dark side. Gillian Cosgriff’s show Actually, Good is one successful example. It won the main award at Melbourne’s comedy festival with its celebration of the small pleasures that make life liveable. A vox pop musical comedy that asks its audience to list 10 things they like, its optimism may strike you as endearingly puppyish, or a little dogged.
I found myself rooting for Cosgriff’s project – inviting us all to be a bit more positive about our lives – while (old cynic that I must be) feeling now and then coerced by the smiley joie de vivre. The show took shape, our host tells us, when she and her partner endured a rainy holiday in the Whitsundays. They devised a game to cheer themselves up, and Cosgriff has been playing it ever since – soliciting favourite things from friends and audiences, compiling their top 10 lists in her Book of Good. “Seeing public transport drivers wave to each other,” is one of her items. “Toddlers with thick accents” is volunteered by a punter tonight.
As you’d expect, the crowd makes both amusing suggestions, and mediocre ones – although Cosgriff must greet them all as if they’re the most heartwarming thing going. A note of insincerity is thus introduced – but kept in check by the actor-comedian’s craft and charm, and by a briskness that keeps us cracking on from song to audience contribution to the next item on Cosgriff’s top 10. The musical numbers, lyrically adroit treatments of her existential crises and “early-onset nostalgia”, with Cosgriff accompanying herself on keyboard, are real highlights. And there’s a deftly dispatched standup riff on the boardgame Guess Who? A recent loss in her personal life, meanwhile, is introduced to undergird the positivity.
If Cosgriff’s conclusions, about delight being “the only way we have to stop time” and so on, feel like over-reach, this remains a winning hour that argues for greater appreciation of the little boons in life we too often take for granted.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August
