Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Every year, dozens of underemployed American actors hurl themselves at the unfeeling granite face of the Fringe and are dashed to pieces amidst a world they couldn’t possibly understand. 

Watching their debut one-man shows feels like receiving reports of people who have to get airlifted off Snowdon after attempting the climb in jeans and wellies. Sometimes the shows aren’t even particularly bad, there’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Fringe is and what its audiences are looking for.

Douglas Widick’s Paperclip makes some of the right noises – it’s a quote-unquote musical romp through time and space with Clippy, the helpful paperclip from the 1997 Microsoft Office suite. In the far future, AI has destroyed the world, so Clippy is going on an extremely incoherent quest back through time to assassinate Alan Turing, father of machine learning.

Widick has two modes in this show. Either Clippy is meeting various figures from internet history (a man-eating captcha; a spectacularly unconvincing Ask Jeeves) via projections on the wall behind him, or he’s doing rather generic musical numbers, including the worst freestyling I’ve ever heard. Respect where it’s due, freestyling at any level is very hard, but here the whole room shares the strain. Both modes involve a lot of perfunctory audience participation.

Widick performs with energy and some warmth, but his sensibility seems alien in so many ways. The script treats us as Americans, making multiple references to incredibly specific American chains and cultural ephemera, and repeatedly referring to the amount of dollars we’ve paid to see the show. 

The unwillingness to respond to cultural context is indicative of a lack of awareness, both of himself and his surroundings. Another, more egregious example: despite being a show notionally about the dangers of AI, and even referring to its catastrophic effects on the climate, Widick uses AI clumsily throughout, very obviously in the visuals and I suspect in composing the music. 

Many of the AI-generated images he uses are of the old school variety, where they don’t even make sense to the eye. As always, one of the most frustrating aspects of AI and its deleterious effects on climate, art and intellect is the certain knowledge that we’re never making the trade for anything good or funny – it’s always in service of poorly-thought-through nonsense like this.

All of this might be bygones if any of the jokes landed. On this outing, we got a few scattered chuckles, although never more than one person at a time. I hope for Widick’s sake that I’m wrong, but my feeling is that this type of slapdash millennial cringe is going to struggle for an audience in Edinburgh.

Review date: 3 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House