Conor O'Toole's Manual Of Style
Live Review

Conor O'Toole cuts an innocent young figure standing in the middle of the stage. His first gag merely raises a slight smile from his quiet and sensible audience, yet he will choose to reuse that very same gag in a few minutes and again to close his show. The reaction then will be quite different.

O'Toole spends an hour talking to us about typefaces and the origins of fonts, half of which is delivered via a low-tech overhead projector with acetate slides, and his set includes a couple of songs on a broken and out of tune guitar. This may not sound like the most entertaining way to spend an hour but the whole audience were sad when it ended, having genuinely loved the show.

The Dubliner firstly wants to assure us that he is not just a weird failed lecturer and after a few jokes get meagre responses, he suggests that he go back to a gig he did just before coming over to Edinburgh that went really well. Unsure of what's coming next, the audience agree and O'Toole shuffles off to grab a pair headphones and begins listening to his previous gig, preparing to recite it back to us along with the subsequent audience interaction. What still sounds like an unworkable situation actually comes off really well, and firstly with a simple gag both praising and deprecating himself at the same time.

With the crowd firmly on-board, the first half is about choosing a typeface with a brief overview of some families of sans-serif fonts starting with the prettiest, the ironically named Grotesque.

In the middle of the show O'Toole has an overtly basic animated story - somehow delivered via his OHP. It's an adorable tale about the lower-case letter ‘a’ and his mixed-race parents which packs a disproportionate amount of laughs. The final section is more about the laying of type before wrapping up with his own ‘manual of style’ and accompanying song. Aptly the only heckle came in the form of an advice request from a primary school teacher in Dublin wanting to know how she could stop a colleague from using Comic Sans - and O'Toole already had a diatribe prepared for Comic Sans.

In truth the opening few minutes of the gig had a familiar feeling of 'this is going to be a long hour'. But after his warm-up routine, time just flew past and when his thoughtful hand-out was distributed, packed full of recaps and extra material, there was a disappointment in the air on the realisation that the show was due to end. There is something friendly and geeky about O'Toole, yet he certainly knows how to craft humour out of the most unlikeliest places. His performance does not feel over-rehearsed or staged, it's just a guy talking about something he loves and the humour comes out of that.

For me, one of the highlights of the Fringe is unexpectedly discovering new talent and O'Toole has managed to put together a delightful hour that somehow manages to both amuse and enlighten us at the same time. There are very few comics who could achieve what O'Toole has with such a dry subject and therein lies the reason to believe that he has a bold future ahead.