Serial award-nominee James Acaster is in that tricky position – Al Murray and Josie Long have been there before him – where one more fruitless Foster’s nomination would start to look like a vendetta.
What can you do, other than continue making shows that are creative enough to render awards immaterial? This is certainly another cracker from the inimitable Kettering native. It’s ostensibly the tale of his recent jury service, but contrives – amid the mindbending gags and eccentric stylings – to imply some opaque metaphor for Acaster’s hankering for certainty, and loss of Christian faith.
There’s no one better at constructing a show: you get the best of freeform standup (Acaster ranges widely) underpinned by delightfully complex comic architecture. Here, Acaster’s relationships with his fellow jurors spin off into wonderfully pedantic riffs on amateur massage, devil’s advocacy and the flaws in the phrase “that’s an hour of my life I’m not getting back”.
As usual with Acaster, half the fun is how emphatically he addresses these vanishingly small subjects – as if, despite his evident social misfittery, we should be grateful for his last word on each subject. But there’s very fine joke-writing, too, from the die/dice wordplay to the routine about evaluating movies by the same criteria as drunken nights out.
Only occasionally does the interest waver. A silent routine in which his mind boggles at the origins of the universe yields little. His “fable of the goose and the sloth”, which is designed to demonstrate his inadequacy as a folklorist, amuses on fewer layers than his work has allowed us to expect.
But there’s a killer closer, and indeed the whole final quarter, which stages Acaster’s spiritual breakdown, offers up rich cod-philosophical comedy, accruing the feeling – if not (explicitly) the substance – of a bona fide revelation.
Laurels or no laurels, this quality of comedy is its own reward, for audiences at least.
• Until 30 August at Pleasance Courtyard. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
