Review by Steve Bennett

It’s marketed under the Stars and Stripes, even using Born In The USA as its opening music, as if being American was enough of an angle at the world’s biggest international arts festival. But then John Cleese’s Daughter And Some Foreigners You’ve Never Heard Of is not such a marketable title, even if it’s the more honest.

With the shortest guest-spot set, opening act Bronston Jones bashed through a lot of cliches: American tourists ‘geeing’ and ‘whizzing’ over history, Brits not being the Downton bunch he’d expected but a drunken horde, and accidentally saying ‘Hello England’ to an Edinburgh crowd. Sometimes an outsider can offer a fresh prospective on a place that millions of locals might have missed from under their nose; but not Jones.

Somewhat surprisingly, the big draw, Camilla Cleese, was the first act proper. Her delivery was mechanical, too rigid, and over-scripted, but she’s got some good lines, including some sharp, dark comebacks to the idiotic comments her 6ft 1in height attracts.

You think she’s not going to mention her famous dad, and when she says: ‘My parents have been married for 42 years,’ there’s a strange atmosphere as we all know her to be lying. But it is, of course, a joke, and a good one at that. She knows we know, and without mentioning her father by name, gets plenty of mileage out of his reputation for marrying increasingly young American blondes.

This, in fact, is most of her set. She has to address the issue, and it’s fertile ground. When she moves on to other issues, the material is notably less assured. Her relative inexperience shows, and there are plenty of flicks of her hair as she covers a hesitancy, but she seems on the right path to being a credible comic, not just a celebrity offspring being indulged.

Cort McCown’s got a much punchier, livelier swagger to match his hard-edged material, mainly about beating children. It’s the old argument that the current generation of kids are mollycoddled my parents with no authority and he doesn’t have any fresh ideas to add to that, but he sells his disdain for youngsters with forceful attitude.

His routine about drunk girls in the street hits an uncomfortable note with its undertone of rape; while suggesting that if men could suck their own dicks we’d all be at home isn’t half as good as Bill Hicks’s version of 22 years ago.

Finally, Sarah Tiana gets started with some lovely lines about her Southern backwater of Calhoun, Georgia, delivered breezily and efficiently. But soon after she seems to have a crisis of confidence about what material and references would be understood by a British audience. She clearly hasn’t done her research if she thinks ‘You’re like Bob Vila!’ makes a workable punchline here.

This, then, is probably not her finest day, but there’s confessionals on being single and picking up inappropriate men, and a theory about the world based on the prevalence of porn, that suggest a stronger strike rate if she kept her eye on the ball.

Review date: 8 Aug 2014
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon