Only on the fringe do you see the same performer in three different shows in the space of 48 hours. I saw Joe Lycett chickening out of a dust-up in The Wrestling, then cold-reading a monologue about female sexuality in Manwatching. But first up, I saw his standup set, a supremely confident hour by a man who makes funny seem easy. He may have been easy on himself, too: this has the air of a thrown-together hour, a more or less randomly assembled scrapbook of entertaining stories and online pranks. Creatively ambitious, it’s not – but it is consistently amusing and Lycett is in effortless control of his material, and the room.
There’s no theme binding together this magpie set, although a consistent picture emerges of a happy homebody, still resident in suburban Birmingham, unfazed by his low-level celebrity, cheerfully dispatching prank emails to pornstars and comedy selfies to antagonistic artisan cafes. The hometown material gives Lycett a strong start, with droll allusions to Fox News’s overestimation of Birmingham’s Muslim population (“salaam alaikum,” deadpans our host) and a skit imagining what it’s like to be Malala Yousafzai’s classmate. Briefly: you’re on a hiding to nothing at Show and Tell.
These excellent routines are greatly enriched by Lycett’s manner: playful, laidback, more like one of us, it feels, than the attention-seeking neurotics you might encounter elsewhere. Even when the quality dips – a story about his friend dropping her chips in a cab; another about renewing his passport at the post office – we still hang on Lycett’s every word. There’s usually a sizeable laugh coming, at the kind of #bullshitquotes (Lycett’s hashtag) that Cheryl Cole posts on Instagram, or at the correspondence he holds with the perpetrator of a property scam, which wears the con-artist down one cheerfully creepy letter at a time. No frills, in short, but very good fun.
- At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Box office: 0131 556 6550.
