Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Fair play to Jacob Hatton for performing to a tiny Fringe audience with enough self-assurance to ensure it never felt too weird. However, his show gives the sense that his confidence is something of a substitute for writing skills.

It’s no spoiler to say this is a storytelling show about the collapse of his relationship, and the death of his father – the latter not causing him much trauma, given their relationship was  strained, in as much as it existed at all.

But the breakup sent him into a funk, which he was talked out of by a man he met at the British Museum. A man who, by chance, the comedian had encountered some months previously when the other guy was at his lowest. On that coincidence the whole show hangs.

However, the story is not very cleanly told, with even that key revelation fumbled. Callbacks are awkwardly deployed, and many jokes are laboured, right from the opening icebreakers about him looking like a history teacher. I’m not sure what that stereotype even is, let alone whether he would fit it. 

Likewise he belts out at least half a dozen history-themed ‘Hey girl, are you…’ pickup lines. That they barely work is the point, but their repetition means the idea quickly goes from ironically bad to actually bad.

Another stretch comes as he talks about his dad dying with a sizeable debt to an adult encounters website. Hatton makes a very great deal of taking its name very literally, but the gag’s not good enough to be worth hammering corny conceit time and again.

And a section about the Bronze Age collapse is blighted by how much he keeps on sardonically insisting there are no parallels with today. Dull repetition is a hard comic technique to master, and Hatton is no Stewart Lee. 

Yet he’s generally personable, clubbable company and when he directly talks about his pet subject of history, his passion makes the subject matter interesting.

But his own history proves a knottier topic to get to grips with in a piece that seems undercooked. ‘Hey girl, are you a Jacob Hatton show, because I came into your sweaty cabin but didn’t feel like you put much effort in…’

Review date: 15 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Hoots @ Nicolson Square