Rob Alderson shares his bugbear

In the past week, and I swear this is true, I have seen four comedians, ranging from good to excellent, and I swear to God, each one over-seasoned their sets with the repetition of phrases that - hand on heart – at best added nothing, and at worst derailed otherwise promising routines. On my life.

‘I swear this is true,’ all too often bookmarks the start and end of a routine and is then sprinkled throughout as well. The point is that it doesn’t matter if a cracking story is true or not. When people go into a comedy club there is a similar suspension of belief that happens in a theatre. Imagine if in Macbeth, Duncan stepped to the front of the stage every ten minutes swearing what you were seeing actually happened, exactly as it was being reproduced in front of you.

Not only does constantly insisting on the veracity of events in a story puncture the pace and rhythm of an anecdote, it also has the opposite effect to the one intended. It makes the audience scrutinise the tale more closely than they would have done.

Both these can be fatal to a good tale, and even to an entire set. The tendency to waste words can be the difference between a good comic and a great one. That’s an obvious point to make in relation to Tim Vine or Stewart Francis, but pore through the transcriptions of Stewart Lee’s routines in his book How I Escaped My Certain Fate and you’d be hard-pressed to find even half a clause that doesn’t have its place.

And ‘I swear this is true’ doesn’t add anything. There are plenty of ways to convey truth without actually saying it – tone, structure, small incidental details. Comedians like Russell Kane, Greg Davies and Prince Abdi are great at it. Daniel Kitson packs his self-confessed theatre shows with imagined details that build an audience-captivating world from thin air. Take even Lee – I don’t think he really did vomit into the mouth and anus of any of the world’s major deities, but details like the cat’s towel in his famous routine disengages the part of the brain that cares.

But the second point – that when a comic protests too much the whole conceit can come crashing down – is more significant. Documentary-style stand-up certainly has a place and many a fine Edinburgh show has been built on the re-telling of apparently real life events – think Phil Nichol’s The Naked Racist and some of Dave Gorman’s best stuff. But nobody enjoys a show less because it might not be real. I’ve never waltzed out of a Terry Saunders show crying ‘This man’s a charlatan! Those people on the screen are mere cartoons!’

I have no idea if Russell Kane’s dad is exactly as he described in last year’s award-winning show at the Fringe. If pushed I would suggest he isn’t – that Kane has exaggerated, selected and tweaked various aspects of his dad’s character for comic effect.

Maybe, gasp, he even made some bits up. I don’t know if Michael McIntyre has a man drawer which contains every single item he describes, making the routine essentially just a comedic memory game. And I don’t mind if Greg Davies and Marek Larwood ever really fired cheeseballs at a dog.

The thing is, in comedy the ends largely justify the means – if it makes us laugh then we don’t really mind how you do it.

Davies’s current show is about moments in which you completely lose yourself. The very best comedy has the same effect – but to keep begging to be believed is a good way to snap punters back to reality.

Rob Alderson ()is a journalist and one-time stand-up