Comedy is not just about jokes, as we comedy types like to whinge – usually when Dave’s joke of the fringe top 10 is released to widespread nonplusment. But sometimes, jokes are precisely what it’s about – the time you spend at Glenn Moore’s show being a perfect example. Moore’s set – now nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award – is the best showcase of pure joke-writing skill I’ve seen on the fringe. They keep coming at you, and back at you, throughout the show, which purports to relate why Moore has applied to go on the first civilian mission to Mars. If he ever gets there, the little green men won’t know what’s hit them.
It’s richer than a straightforward battery of one-liners would be because Moore has threaded them into a story; and because (disavowing a career-long commitment to frivolous fictions) he pretends that the story is true. That’s just a game, of course, a wrong-way-up way of celebrating the ludicrousness of Moore’s shtick, as he introduces his flatmate, a surgeon who operates after all-night drinking sprees, and his inamorata, with whom he has sex so wild that “afterwards, we exchanged insurance details”.
If Moore really does regret his inability to be honest on stage, he shouldn’t. The quality of the gags, and how they recur in unexpected shapes throughout the show, is as compelling as honesty ever was. I was high on the pleasure of it, as zingers about the film Groundhog Day, the crime of attempted murder and Moore’s abundant inadequacies (“I’m a man with only two weaknesses – being vague, and another weakness”) flesh out the backstory to his longed-for flight from Earth to the stars.
If I’ve a reservation, it’s that the show is scripted to the hilt, and that Moore – a bumbling English posho from central casting – leaves little space for it to breathe, or bounce off its audience. But that’s a minor quibble at a standup set with major appeal. It’s blissfully silly, expertly stitched together – and you could assemble a killer top 10 jokes of the fringe from these 60 minutes alone.
- At Just the Tonic @ The Tron, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
