The Curse Of The Average

It's Fringe time again, and I’m reviewing for ThreeWeeks (your best source for Fringe reviews, updated daily!) once more.  While I love the discipline of writing 120 word reviews, cramming in the flavour of the show, whether it’s any good and a touch of interest into a tiny amount of text, it doesn’t leave much room to expound upon the good, deconstruct the bad or just reflect upon the act of reviewing itself.  So I figured I’d take the odd review and talk around it here.  All the reviews I'm going to talk about over the next while will be from the ThreeWeeks website.  Drop by and check out some more reviews once you're done.  So, without further ado, let’s dive in with the first show I saw this year.

 ED2013 Comedy Review: Mark Dolan – You’re Awesome! (PBJ Management)

Fainting audience members are not the best end to a gig but at least they’re memorable, unlike much of the rest of Mark Dolan’s routine. Dolan is a sharp performer with a good delivery and he judges the line between amusingly creepy and just plain creepy well, particularly when bantering with the audience. However, his scripted material sometimes feels old and dull – topical references to Barak Obama and Comet surely belong to Festivals past – and sections on obesity and married life trundle on too long with too few jokes. Additionally, his list of “awesome things” is decidedly hit or miss. Dolan might think life is awesome, but this show, while entertaining enough, is just a bit average.

Gilded Balloon Teviot, until 25 Aug (not 12), 7:45pm.
tw rating 3/5 | [Andrew Bell]

I always hope for a good show to review for my first gig of the year.  Something to warm me up to the Fringe, get me back into the 120 word, ThreeWeeks swing and generally get the creative juices flowing.  Note that a “good show to review” is not the same as “reviewing a good show”.  Dolan’s show stood out for two things: my being schmoozed by a PR agent prior to the gig and the rather abrupt end, when an audience volunteer collapsed on stage, only one of which was useful for the purposes of reviewing.  (Although, any PRs out there who wish to schmooze me further, feel free to get in touch…)

It’s perhaps rather cruel to admit it, but when the gig (and James from the audience) came to a crashing halt, I did think “Well, at least I’ll have a hook to start the review”.  The reason I thought that was because this was not a good show to review.  Rather, it was the very opposite, the bane of every reviewer’s existence, the reasonably competent, middle of the road, three star mediocrity of a gig that can be adequately summed up in one word, “meh”.

Average shows are a nightmare to review.  The problem comes from the fact that it’s much easier to criticise the bad bits (and there will be bad bits) than it is to praise the competent bits.  Let’s look in depth at a couple of bits of my review, shall we?

 “Dolan is a sharp performer with a good delivery and he judges the line between amusingly creepy and just plain creepy well…”

Ahh, the good old “charismatic performer” line, albeit in a different guise.  When I write this, I know I’m struggling to balance out a review between positive and negative.  It’s a bit like being asked if someone’s outfit makes their bum look big and starting with “Well, I like the colour but…”  The problem is that charisma and stage presence are often all that separates a three star show from a two star one.  The material itself is frequently of similar quality and a performer’s ability to tell a bad joke but make it funny anyway does matter.  The second bit, about being creepy well, is perhaps something I’m more aware of as a reviewer than the general audience might be.  Done well, you don’t notice it – you’re too busy laughing at the appalling thing the stand-up has just said – but done poorly and it’s cringe time.  I’ve seen a lot of people, particularly those without enough stage time under their belts, get this really wrong.  (They usually then compound the error by blaming the audience, but that’s another story.)

 “However, his scripted material sometimes feels old and dull – topical references to Barak Obama and Comet surely belong to Festivals past…”

As it stands, this isn’t too damning, but that’s only because I spent ten minutes re-writing this section to balance the review.  I had a lot of examples I could have put in here – from the section about his wife to the ineffable feeling that you’d heard these jokes before.  Doing so, however, made the review read too critically – it would have seemed like a two star review had I elaborated any further on the flaws – and the truth is the show wasn’t that bad.  Yes it wobbled and, yes, it felt tired at times, but some of that will improve once Dolan has a few runs under his belt (it was the very first night when I saw it) and it was pretty entertaining the rest of the time.  It’s just it was entertaining in a rather non-specific, averagely bland kind of fashion, and that’s hard to convey, particularly in 120 words.  (For reference, that’s 44 words less than this single paragraph.)

After all this is said and done, you end up with a review that, like the show it’s critiquing, is rather bland.  Neither particularly effusive in praise, nor damning in criticism.  A review without any real interest, basically, but which gets the job done and then goes home and which, rather like Mark Dolan's gig, can be summed up in one word, “meh.”

But I doubt that would get past the editors.

Mark Dolan is on at the Gilded Balloon until the 25th of August.  Tickets are available from the Edinburgh Fringe Box Office, or at the venue.