Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

With a  truly singular mind and talent, there’s never been another performer quite like Johnny White Really-Really. Not since Ivor Cutler at least.

When watching him, I’m sometimes struck by how he seems to simultaneously represent stand-up’s past and future. On one level, he’s a good old-fashioned sui generis Fringe weirdo, the supposed disappearance of whom Stewart Lee likes to bemoan. On the other, he’s taking the artform in a genuinely modern direction: an unclassifiable landscape in which he still constitutes the only outpost.

Greying, baby-faced, swamped in an enormous orange hoodie, he stands very still and performs observational storytelling comedy about a world that only he seems to inhabit, mixing soulful mundanity with dreamlike fantasy. He speaks in a soft, high voice using dizzyingly rich, precise language. He has qualities that are both sorcerous and plaintive; a little like the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi, there’s ‘a tear on every note’.

His opening story tonight concerns a seemingly endless voyage through a forest, towards a great red tree of light that shimmers on the horizon. ‘I thought to myself, I’ll need a holiday just to get over this holiday!’ he concludes cheerily, getting his first big laugh of the show.

After that, this audience was with him all the way, although some inevitably will not be. As brilliantly original as he is, with such a core of universality, he’s going to perplex a lot of punters who are used to speed, edginess and smarm. Which is a shame, because his comedy categorically enriches the soul.

The through-line of the show comes from an incident from his real life, but it’s not the traditional catching-up session of a panel show comedian. ‘People who are proficient at answering the question, "What have you been up to?" contain inside themselves a kind of natural evil,’ he says. But he later contradicts himself in one of the best lines of the show: "I’d much rather kill myself than make any sort of claim about anything at all."

At a party, White finds himself drawn to a poster depicting dancing cats and the word ‘Catland’. Something about the poster – it’s never clear quite what – is inspirational. An indefinable seed has been planted, although he’s not sure whether it’s a seed for a new show or access to a whole new world.

The new world is a place where spiders can be turned silver with a wish, and White might be ‘visited in his chambers’ by the apparition of Jacob Marley for a night drinking vodka out of Volvic bottles. If you’ve never seen him before, there can be something uneasy about the way that he doesn’t sign the same illusory contract of truthfulness as other comics. Instead, his material takes place in a dream – and like a dream, it bypasses the cynicism of the superego to access some deep comedic receptor.

White is to me what Catland is to him, and this is his best show yet. I could listen to him talk until I turn to stone.

Review date: 17 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)