Collin Moulton / Christopher MacArthur Boyd / Dublin - Bobby Carroll's Comedy Diary

Dublin... I have been bamboozled. Hoodwinked. Swizzed. This entry is going to sadly read much like a disgruntled TripAdvisor review for a few paragraphs, so I am sorry. 2 stars.

A family trip over to Ireland I decided to book my parents and us in for some midweek comedy to fill an evening. And turning up at the address I almost instantly regretted it. The venue where we were going to the basement of was 'meh' even for a city centre high street pub. The drinks were flat considering they were at the top end of the area's high price point, the decor had been refurbished to be Insta friendly with minimal consideration for us poor souls who wanted to relax in its furnishings.

When we got downstairs and found our row, alarm bells started ringing. The stage was distractingly right by the door to the main bogs; the cellar was absolutely freezing; kegs were stored at the back, as this subterranean room had their optimum temperature at heart. As the ragtag groups of tourists found their seats many shivered; nobody removed an outdoor layer; all huddled for warmth. And then we waited for an eternity like the last scene of John Carpenter's The Thing, watching our own breath, trying to figure out who on the seats was a punter and who was a comedian, while the promoter delayed the kick-off to fill the room with passing suckers. It would be a compromised, awkward set up for a free entry new material night, but someone is making a lucrative killing here.

The show itself was a disappointing mix of obviously just-graduated-from-a-comedy-course acts (those who ran the door, did the flyering), a perennial open spot (who I know never made it in London after a long stretch trying) struggling through half thought-out abrasive material and an MC who had some chops but kept trying to wrestle the generous international crowd to whatever national stereotype he had some script on. Even when it became achingly clear that they weren't 'those' Americans; we weren't 'those' expats.

Clunky, overpriced, and not a sign of the recognisable name headliner listed. Of course, advertised line-ups are always subject to change but I am sure, if you audited the spreadsheets, the promised closer was more aspirational (they might pop in to try new stuff on a whim once a month) rather than a selling point the gig should have ever been marketed on. Now, I have been at many a tourist trap gig before... I remember Inkey Jones from the bad old days of the Leicester Square flyering wars... I just never thought I'd be the rube being fleeced out of €50 for a pneumonia-and-new-act night. There's one born every minute - thanks Dublin, you took me to school.

Back home at Edinburgh's Monkey Barrel and one act who never needs to worry about falling foul of the Trades Description Act was Wisconsin's Collin Moulton. If you asked a British bloke on the street to draw a picture with crayons of what a US stand-up looks like the result might uncannily match Moulton. His raspy but muscular dialect, oaky tan, massive tatt'd forearms, ageing soul patch and tight black attire. He could be the host of a wrestling podcast, or the memorable henchman in a John Travolta action thriller. Everything about him screams circuit veteran and there's something hardwired into British audiences' brains that, when we hear this accent and see this form, makes us deep down acknowledge "This is the real shit!".

Being a comedian as pure and as mature as Moulton, though, does come with a downside. You can tell he is used to eliciting massive responses on his home turf and he has figured out at least an era ago how to make a big room thunder. He probably soared at the Monkey Barrel's Friday and Saturday night club nights. His newly formed observations on Edinburgh and the UK carrying over well to a room with as many visitors as residents. Sunday night for his "special taping" and the crowd was a bit more reserved, intimate and definitively Scottish.

Being an outsider playing a British crowd can be the difference between playing the double bass and the harp. You approach the instrument the same way, and essentially you are still plucking strings in the same order, but you must accept one makes easy deep loud notes and the other takes a fair deal of agility and understanding to get anything resembling a melody out of. Moulton could travel 100 miles in any direction and get a different response for his innocuous rhetorical questions about the BBC (Scottish nationalists often think it is biased) or the coronation (Jesus Christ... don't touch that with a looong stick if you want consensus, even in posh old Edinburgh), but anywhere in the UK he is going to struggle to get straight, quick answers about who is married to whom and where people are from. The Brits as an audience are an obstructive breed by nature. He tried to gain status in the room by dissing Glasgow, usually a solid tactic, 'that neighbouring town is a shithole... nudge, nudge'... only, half the audience seemed to be over from there celebrating the bonus bank holiday. And every normal trick he tried to move onto material is thwarted by a muted response to him going into the room and bouncing off the audience for natural momentum in the ramp up.

You could tell Moulton was inwardly thrown that these safe bets weren't paying off. He grinded away, styled out the missteps with grace and battled onward with enthusiasm. And to put his mind at ease he was doing everything right. A Sunday evening audience of unwarmed Scots are going to be exactly this level of unhelpful to an unguarded act who likes some innocent crowd work to ease into a routine. Someone should have given him a heads up. I could see, 15 minutes in, an expression of relief on his face when stuff started to land more impactfully and the show he intended to video for online purposes felt like it was going to be worth the week's trip across the Atlantic after all.

There was much to laugh at here. Moulton's family stuff about ass wiping your elders and vodka-soaked kidney transplants were vivid with rich, unforced character work. You can tell there's a lot of trauma in his past but he resurrects both troublesome parents with an acidic affection. I relished any story that either or both cropped up in. He tools around heavily with the rule of three yet goes light on the callbacks. His wife's fussiness in picking an eatery - thus making other people hangry... a superb bit and because he hadn't overused the device, the nice callback tag felt atomic.

In the last third of the show, he began to talk about travelling to the town in England named after his ancestors and discovering his lineage includes a Music Hall ventriloquist, a revelation that made me howl. And then, no matter how far he went back, that every Moulton was an utter bastard felt like a gift from history. He paired this with the tale his feckless dad told him as a kid, the dark fable about the scorpion and the frog. If all this has the colour and the shape of an August themed hour or the "dead dad" show... then it does. Maybe Moulton doesn't know he's stumbled onto a British sub-genre of stand-up that wins plaudits over here... at least if you have the right publicist and agency backing you.

A bonus bit of entertainment happened when the filming crew ask Moulton to do a few pick-ups after we cheered him off. He needed to retake a few lines to replace rude words like 'Tits' and 'Assholes' for the North American market. The whole epilogue had the air of the bloopers played over the end credits of a franchise flick like Toy Story or Rush Hour. By this point such goodwill has been generated in the room that he got an electric response repeating himself and mucking around with the visual continuity. I liked Collin Moulton, he's a grafter and I was glad he ended on a victory after all the hard work.

Christopher MacArthur-Boyd makes no qualms after bounding onstage that his latest show, Oh No, is an "existential howl into the abyss." And that might suit his Morrissey looks and heavy metal preferences but the content of this hour chiefly plays out accessible and light. There's no anger, bitterness, philosophising, or monotone defeatism. A whistlestop tour of his childhood, early start in comedy and lockdown inertia. You get a little scared that all he's got in his back pocket to fulfil his angst-ridden pitch are chuckle worthy tales of not fitting in on a Magaluf lads holiday and his mum buying the wrong brand of posh pasta sauce. Oh No is not exactly Girl Interrupted or Young Mungo. It is a relief when he eventually recounts disassociating and pissing himself at the midway point.

MacArthur-Boyd shines when he self-deprecates. And he attacks himself with a verbose gusto as the overarching story takes form. His elongated Glaswegian vowels stroke deft writing into sounding off-the-cuff, and his act outs take maximum advantage of his marionette-like body. He twists his limbs into some illustrative angles for our benefit.

Heaven Knows I'm Miserablist Now. Who cares if CMB's current hour sells us the pits of working-class male depression but delivers a box of middle-class onions. If it is fresh and funny, it is worth subscribing to. And MacArthur-Boyd has been consistently gifting us the goods for a long time now. He is seasoned, accomplished and, whether he likes it or not, he is a crowd pleaser.

I have enjoyed MacArthur-Boyd maybe half a dozen times over the past decade and he always seems ahead of the curve in terms of craft and career. With a trademark look and a beefy comedy skillset he feels like a sure thing, always on the cusp of comedy stardom. All that is possibly holding him back is he hasn't stumbled across that one lightning in a bottle, name making, killer routine... yet... He will.

The closest he gets to unlocking that trophy here is an animated bit about Scotland being the number one country for cocaine abuse. It has minimal biographical content so sticks out like a sore thumb. Yet it builds with a cascade of memorable lines and feels fully fleshed out. Climaxing on a keyed-up Sigmund Freud at a house party, the Victorian psychoanalyst fully inhabiting MacArthur-Boyd's bones, it probably belongs later on in the set-list, as the showstopper high to this professional hour.