Just the Spare Room
The Caves
Aug 6-30 (23:40)
I always like to catch at least one split-bill show at the Fringe. We live in a TikTok, swipe-right era, after all, & sometimes you don’t want the full tasting menu—you want to stick your fork into five different dishes & see what happens.
Notes: The Comedy B-Sides is built around a cracking little premise. Comedians perform the mad shit they’ve accumulated in the Notes apps on their phones: stray thoughts, half-formed jokes, observations & fragments that might otherwise never escape into the world. There’s practically a literary form in there all by itself. I’m a massive fan of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for example, & what was Blake doing half the time if not scribbling down the strange explosions going off inside his head?
So what do we get?
Our MC was Steven Gordon, a nice chap who doesn’t need to be the funniest person in the room. He’s perfect as the segmenting bun-slice in our massive gag-burger, holding everything together while the fillings change around him. The central theme of his own comedy seems to be Crufts—his nan won it, apparently—and after delivering a punchline he gives this little wry corner-of-the-mouth smile which I really like. A comedian who makes himself laugh. I can totally relate; sometimes when my own comedy cauldron bubbles something up at random I genuinely think I’m one of the funniest people alive.
We then got five comedians, all ostensibly looking through their phones. I’m not entirely convinced they were rummaging through their Notes apps quite as much as the premise suggests; occasionally it felt like they were adapting to the concept while running through some of their best material. But who cares? What followed was a healthy taste of the Fringe.
Hilarity tapas, kinda vibes.
Robin Grainger was first. Robin famously performed a Fringe show to a single audience member, an experience which subsequently went globally viral and turned him into something of a comedy-news phenomenon. He’s since become a regular on the UK circuit & performs internationally.
I really like him. His extended homage to Sellotape was proper funny, as was a section involving a misgendered magpie. There’s a clever mind operating inside this lad; he can take something utterly mundane, prod it from an unexpected angle & suddenly find the ridiculousness hiding inside.
Next was Valeria Vulpe, whose comedy star is very much in the ascendancy. After a decade as a data scientist at Google—and an MSc in Applied Mathematics from LSE—she made the fairly considerable career swerve into stand-up. Since then she’s opened for Ricky Gervais at Wembley Arena, supported Daniel Sloss & Connor Burns, reached the So You Think You’re Funny? final & won the Spirit of Comedy competition.
With Val, the pan is very much buried & her routines arrive with all the emotional ceremony of the drunken widow at the wake. I quite enjoyed her robotic style, although I’m not entirely sure I could handle a full hour of it. In these smaller doses, however, the deadpan delivery works beautifully.
“Don’t you hate it when your ex improves?”
And, this being Edinburgh:
“Every bus is an award-winning bus.”
Then there’s New York:
“In New York, if someone smiles at you, you’re about to get cummed on.”
Next up was an American, self-described “setting my people back” Jewish lady, whose name unfortunately flew straight past me. Her comedy, however, didn’t. This was pure cutting-edge New York energy.
By now it struck me what a strange little international buffet we’d assembled: Britain, Moldova, America—the world’s in Edinburgh, squeezed together in a room and rifling through its phones.
My favourite part of her segment concerned her incel brother justifying the gender pay gap by arguing that men have to buy women drinks at the bar. She then proceeded to calculate precisely how many drinks would need to be purchased before genuine financial equality had been achieved.
Yeah. Clever & funny.
Adam Flood was next, who I’d reviewed a few nights previously performing his stand-up-over-rave-music set. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a whole new bunch of jokes coming out. All credit to him, & all praise—he’s a top lad with plenty of material in the ammunition belt. His wobbling physical impression of somebody paralysed from the waist up was a particular highlight.
I have to be honest: by the final comedian I was starting to flag. I’d been out in the field all day & the show had now pushed beyond the hour mark. I was still laughing, but I’d stopped taking notes.
Even reviewers are mortal.
I do remember the phrase:
“Cholera is a lovely name for a girl.”
Which pretty much represents my surviving memories of the rest of the fellow’s work.
And perhaps that’s actually the beauty of Notes: The Comedy B-Sides. It’s scrappy, varied & slightly unpredictable. Some bits land harder than others; some performers suit the format better than others; & you’re never quite certain whether you’re hearing a genuinely embryonic thought retrieved from somebody’s phone or a polished joke that’s snuck in through the back door.
But that’s the Fringe, innit?
All in all, this is a great late-night session with which to finish your day—or get your nighttime started. Either way, you’ll be heading back out onto the Edinburgh streets with a smile on your face.
Damo
