He may be making his 10th Edinburgh appearance, but you can’t accuse Ivo Graham of coasting. He’s got three separate shows at this year’s festival, and the main one, Organised Fun, takes his standup in a new direction – at the behest of his infant daughter, he explains. I respect the old dog’s openness to new tricks, but regret to report that, in this instance, it is not rewarded.
What we usually get from the 33-year-old is the burbling comedy of posh English illness-at-ease. Last year’s show added a new layer of – well, not gravitas exactly, but a little hard-knocks grit in the gilded Old Etonian machine. But if you thought Graham might be growing up, Organised Fun has news for you. This is a wholly inconsequential hour, which begins with standup below Graham’s usual standard, and ends with a participatory gameshow below the standard of other comics who do that sort of thing much better.
The gig is drifting before it’s even begun, as Graham dwells too long in conversation with Matthew and Sean in the front row. When he extricates himself, we get some self-abasing standup about his unglamorous touring life and recent last-place stint on Taskmaster. Graham is too good for there not to be some terrific jokes here – like the one about the film Sliding Doors, or the one about the get-to-know-you game Two Truths and a Lie. But much of this material (about TV show The Traitors, and a game of Harry Potter Top Trumps) is relentlessly trivial and over-reliant on the comedy of Graham’s nerdy obsessiveness.
By the second half, when he brings a bespoke Top Trumps game to life with audience volunteers, the laughs are still thinner on the ground. Some comics have a flair for this crowd-work-heavy comedy; Graham isn’t one of them. There’s no spectacle nor much fun, organised or otherwise, to the game he’s created, which in any case gets bogged down in admin. Props to the veteran for trying something new – but as Taskmaster fans might have anticipated, he does not make a success of it.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 27 August
