Only 10 years after her Fringe debut, Alice Fraser now feels like one of the more retro comedians on the circuit. She describes herself as working ‘at the intersection of dick jokes and philosophy,’ but she’s more like a human version of the popular xkcd webcomic: an enthusiastic nerd who probably owned a I Fucking Love Science T-shirt, and likes to frame her jokes around spurious statistical analysis. 

Her positioning of herself as a kind of cool teacher can sometimes feel a little un-self-aware, especially if you’re used to your comedians at least pretending to be oafs, but her trusty vim and vigour for her material can usually propel her over the cringe hump, and she’s beloved by her core audience.

Her new show, Oh Man, is produced partly on the occasion of having a four-year-old boy. What, she wonders, is the best way to make a good man? And before we can answer that, how do we even quantify masculinity? Quantification of things that obviously can’t be quantified being very important to self-identified science geeks.

Nerd pride is real and valid though. Indicating from the outset that she’s not afraid to be unfashionable, Fraser opens the show by saying she likes men. ‘Most of the men I know are fine… and I do think it needs to be said by someone who isn’t Andrew Tate.’

That argument alone is rare enough at the Fringe that it’s an interesting premise for a show, but Fraser is keen not to present something so sparse. This is the most PowerPointy of PowerPoint shows, many of the jokes coming with their own graph. 

There’s also the added conceit that we would have to pay for an Alice Fraser Premium account in order to see the show in the right order, so (as demonstrated by a graph) our economy membership tier only allows us access to a mixed-up version with the emotional bit at the beginning, too many dick jokes bunched together etc etc. as well as periodic ad breaks.

Then on top of THAT there’s a third and possibly fourth conceit where the show is being used as an education tool for an AI called Anthropomorphic, which in turn is going to programme a sentient Roomba called Elon Dust, who stands in for Fraser’s son. One woman, too many cooks: most of the interesting material gets buried under this vaguely satirical gubbins. I respect and share many of her fears about AI, but that’s a separate show from the masculinity stuff.

Thankfully, the quality of her stand-up shines through for the most part. She knows her way around a joke structure, that’s for sure, and she fires them out at an impressive rate: puns, arch references, pleasing little one-liners. 

The storytelling aspect works too. She doesn’t give away much of her personal life, but she knows how to get you invested in the parts that she does show. 

Ultimately it’s a wavelength thing. She’d be more on mine if she stopped saying things like ‘I exist at the intersection of dick jokes and philosophy,’ and just… told the dick jokes, philosophically or otherwise.