Gregory Akerman: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Laughing Horse @ The Free Sisters

Gregory Akerman says – probably not entirely earnestly – that he doesn’t think comedy is art, but mere entertainment.

Unfortunately, this agonisingly slow hour is neither, but a sort of semi-factual lecture encapsulating some potentially interesting subjects and ideas, which he fails to make only the least bit funny. Certainly laughs were a very scarce commodity as he languidly circled around the themes of his show – only really raising a chuckle when he screwed up his lines.

He’s read a lot about the devil, about the origins of 666 as the purported mark of Satan, and about 18th century Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote a detailed description of hell, based on what God told him personally – and wants to share that book-learning with us in his aridly dry tones.

The genesis for this obsession supposedly came from a bad review he received at last year’s Fringe, which he read out line-by-line to challenge and over-analyse, not letting it lie.  In fact, it sounds like two reviews he’s disingenuously stuck together, as the first couple of paragraphs were measured, informed critique – the second half, the sort of cheap insults made by the very inexperienced. and ends on an apparent accusation that he’s the devil.

No, he’s not the devil – but he is trying too hard to be Stewart Lee. That’s a go-to comparison for almost any comedian who speaks slowly, but Akerman has got the cadence and structure down to a T, including the deadpan way Lee plays back imagined conversations in line-by-line detail, circling around the point we know he was going to make all along. But while Akerman’s picked up the technique, he’s failed to grasp the bits that make them funny.

Some of the information Akerman has unearthed is potentially fascinating, but suffocated by this delivery. And he needs to remind himself that comedy needs to aim for laughs. Aside from the material about Beelzebub, he talks about his brother attempting suicide, and how he tried to exploit that for a sympathy shag, in a segment that struggles to get past the awkward and morbid.

The whole hour was performed to near-silence: respectful but hardly what you would want from a stand-up show. Still, it was very well-researched, you have to give him that.