Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Devin Gray got divorced and his wife didn't have the decency to make the split anything but amicable, leaving him grasping for recriminatory feelings to channel into his Fringe show. 

Just about the best he can say of her reasonableness is that by being German, she drew negative preconceptions away from him being a white South African, and that he was always just doing what he was told.

Still, the fact that their biggest fight was over who got to keep the garlic press and the air fryer, which he treasures above any value his friends ascribe to their children, offers some indication of how badly Gray is doing in the aftermath. Beyond a few salutary lessons about how incompatible they were from the outset, this isn't a show dissecting a dysfunctional marriage. Rather, it's an exploration of a divorced man's cracked state of mind – and a very funny one at that.

With ready self-mockery, he acknowledges that he gives off a vibe of the shop-worn. Yet he's adept at finding the silver linings with grim, even gallows, wit such as his car having acquired greater value since he lost the house. Sensitive when confronted by happy couples, he nevertheless wearily bats away the platitudes and well-meaning advice his friends give him, unwilling to put a brave face on for the sake of appearances.

Reflecting for a moment upon the marriage, he realises he was always on edge, his wife's passion for true crime podcasts extrapolated into her having homicidal intentions towards him. All very tongue-in-cheek, the inventiveness of his paranoia is nevertheless exquisitely well conveyed, with the slightest thing out of the ordinary liable to tip him into panic.

Meetings with divorce lawyers and counsellors were characterised by his inability to suppress his comedy instincts, affording him pyrrhic victories and little scraps of dignity, even as he meekly signed away his former life. 

Perhaps the real boon of his singledom now is not so much that he's free to date again – he barely mentions the possibility – but that he's acquired intuition about couples on the verge of breaking up. Stalking them around supermarkets, delighting when he hears the seemingly innocuous but tell-tale phrases, it's a lovely bit of original and distinctive stand-up that would grace any hour.

Just as he can't disguise his divorced vibe, though, Gray also betrays the mein of the long-term therapy seeker, with his issues pre-dating the marriage by years. In counselling since he was 16, he's learned to turn the negative connotations to his advantage and to twist the psychobabble to gaggy wisecracks, suggesting an hilarious alternative meaning for the cliché 'hurt people hurt people'.

A hypochondriac, frustrated that of all the mental health conditions, anxiety gets such short shrift in Hollywood movies, he's full of other eccentric quirks, such as his fear of restaurant cutlery, affording him distinctive, slightly defensive perspectives.

His assertion that he was effectively raised by television rather than his parents in the 1990s, leading him to see Jackass's Steve O as a role model, representing a golden period of nostalgia that he could lean upon when the marriage was crumbling, feels a bit too much of a stretch, too tangential and something of a reach even for someone digging back in therapy.

Still, his half-hearted self-improvement kick, with suggestions on an alternative regimes to the gym, of dating apps for broken men and motivational quotes of bald truths for the mildly toxic, bring the show to a satisfying conclusion and carry the appealing sense of someone picking themselves off the floor, retaining a sharp sense of humour if not half their possessions.

Review date: 23 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ Bar 50