Tim Lee: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Assembly Roxy

In the spirit of Tim Lee’s show, I’ll present this review as a pie-chart.

For this is his gimmick – and gimmick is all it is – which he uses far too heavily. His presentation is to briefly outline some scientific idea, usually with a  graph or equation, then he would make some lame, generic joke that could somehow use the same idea.

So the breaking of molecular bonds is like a sportsman breaking their marriage bond; or he’ll present a graph showing the four possible ends of a night of drunkenness. This is hack comedy with too much education; a show with the feel of a lecturer putting in a few weak jokes to try to spice up his academic topic rather than infusing it with genuine passion.

Similarly he makes up syndromes such as ISC – iPhone Superiority Complex – and expects that to get a laugh, while his PowerPoint slides include equations like Peanuts + Chewing = Peanut Butter. Sometimes it feels like you’d need a supercollider to detect the faint traces of his wit. Neither Nobel nor the Edinburgh Comedy Awards need bother themselves with this.

Elsewhere, he sets up a maths problem about whether Louis Walsh could get to a bomb shelter before the ordinance falls. Now my guess is this American had probably never heard of Louis Walsh a couple of weeks ago – and almost certainly has no genuine beef with him – he’s just lazily dropped in a celebrity name he thinks people won’t like. Such meaningless pop culture references abound.

Lee delivers with a quiet authority, but it’s none-too-exciting, while his insistence on having his website address displayed on his screen at all times suggests self-promotion is his main concern.

On a comedy circuit where proper, exciting scientific ideas are openly discussed for those who want to hear it, Lee is doing his best  to make the subject seem boring again.  This flat show is a  binary system of luminous celestial plasma spheres … or two stars.