Pony tales top the bill with further laughs from dating and mum issues
Laughing Horse @ Jekyll & Hyde
SINGLEDOM IS a wellmi n e d s o u r c e o f stand-up humour. B u t Matt Nagi n’ s deliciously warped, non-PC treatment of the American dating scene is a joy. The Jewish New Yorker quickly establishes an easy rapport with the packed late-night audience in the less than airy Aerie Room as he tears into the dating customs of “LA chicks” and their New York counterparts.
“You guys want some Jew jokes?” he then asks, before a brilliantly irreverent riff, taking in a Texan antisemite, slavery in Egypt and “Jesus Christowitz”, of whom he suggests: “He needed to shrink it [his surname], so he could have a career in the entertainment industry.”
Nagin also seamlessly works a sublimely funny Bob Dylan impression into his gloriously filthy act, which is part of the Free Festival.
Though the tempo dips a little midway through (perhaps under the weight of his dark humour), his love of performing shines through.
Until August 25
Assembly Hall
FOR A bit of high class tomfoolery, Jacob Edwards delivers a masterclass in the art of silliness.
The Bucks-based actor and TV producer has some Edinburgh previous as half of the well-received Sunday Defensive.
And although his debut solo show has been a while coming, it proves worth the wait.
Attired in dinner jacket and jeans, he brings to the show a range of zany characters, one of whom “nets” a punter with a fishing rod baited with a cigarette packet.
And there is more than a hint of Steve Furst’s alter ego Lenny Beige in his smooth-talking stand-up Remy Martin, who mouths insults drowned out by the theme music to A Question of Sport.
His egotistical saddo Roger Showbusiness parodies the sleazy underbelly ofthe industry while wiping his sweaty brow with a colourful bra.
You can detect a Cooganesque element to some of the comic creations. But when into his stride, there is some really surreal and original stuff from the Show Pony.
Until August 26
Just the Tonic at The Caves
PICTURE IN your mind Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, expunge the bloodshed and add a strong dollop of black Jewish humour and you have something approaching Al Lubel’s savagely witty, mother-fixated act.
The former lawyer from West Hollywood mercilessly mimics his smothering Florida-based mother, with whom he has a love-hate relationship, in a self-revelatory late-night routine.
“Part of me wishes I was gay because I really need a man in my life,” he declares, half-jokingly.
Lubel opens with an insanely funny, linguistically playful five-minute riff on his name. He then embarks upon a journey starting from birth in Queens, New York: “Stay in, Alan, there’s a draught — you’ve got a wet head,” he says, miming his mother. Then comes Hebrew school, with his mother waiting to pick him up in a car outside, his troubled, late puberty, his shortcomings as a lawyer and his difficulties forming relationships with women. All of it garnished with lashings of matriarch.
It’s poisonously hilarious and Lubel engages adeptly with the crowd.
Until August 25
Gilded BalloonTeviot
LAURA LEVITES — “it’s pronounced ‘levitis’, like a disease”, she explains helpfully, hugging me, after a postshow confessional — performs a onehour routine about drugs, denial and depression. Now depression can be a suitable subject for stand-up and the eBay-addicted, Prada bag-loving, binge-cleaning, thirtysomething New Yorker displays courage in putting herself out there, inviting a reserved audience to pass judgment.
But the shrieky self-indulgence and the in-yourface revelling in miserableness doesn’t r e a l l y cut it.
A “d i d y o u do drugs like me because your parents divorced”? shock show rather than an illuminating attempt to explore the reasons. Until August 26