Tony Law / Dating Crapp / Fin Taylor - Bobby Carroll's Comedy Diary

Written by: Bobby Carroll
Published: Thursday 9th March 2023

A Now Begin In Again is Tony Law in his dead dad's long johns. Tony Law in his cockney son's top hat. He starts with the tugboat. A blast of traditional Tony Law's tugboat. The Canadian tugboat horn is all his. Microphone in mouth. Imaginary cord pulled from above his head. The bracing noise fills the room. Comforting for fans, a lifeline to get on board for the uncertain.

There's a stretch at making this a personal show. About parents. Tony Law doesn't crowbar sentiment in. He re-enacts a Nixon era horse race. Secretariat was his mother's favourite horse. If there's a message it's the weird shit we remember, keep hold of. That feels very on point for Tony Law.

It is all here - the constant, rapid subversion. The unavoidable lack of links. The 'fuck it' attitude towards structure. Law is an experience not a cerebral exercise. There's a Dam Busters routine that had my wife in fits of giggles. I was baited for the throwaway reason for the falconry gloves he wore unreferenced for nearly the entire show time. Tony Law is a shaman of the surreal, and to this comedy fan he is as comforting as a pair of old slippers. Just a joy to watch a master at his best.

Dating Crapp is a fortnightly improv show centred around audience members' dating profiles. Jason Perez is our host. He wiggles around the audience pre-show... fishing for marks who are willing to admit they have a live profile, and then seeks their consent to share it with the room.

Perez is a sweet presence. Full of slightly forced enthusiasm but he is a true blue American with a distinctively raspy Casey Kasem lilt so perhaps that is his default factory setting. He does a solid job marshalling all the admin and it is fair to say keeping the show on the rails is his greatest strength. The cringe factor is sidestepped thanks to him.

The two volunteers he ropes into being centre stage are two Bellshill students. Unguarded teenagers to whom everything and everyone they know breaks down to the descriptives of either "insane" or "boring". Perez chats through an exploratory expedition, hoping for gold. Each woman sits on a stool while he goes about bobbing at them like a smiling interrogator. Their profiles are projected up onto a big screen and swiped at for the rest of us. Nothing embarrassing or revelatory is accidentally displayed. In terms of comedy, having them up on stage produces little of note. They are inoffensive, he is patient. Especially with the meagre responses he grinds out of them. For the audience there are no shock disclosures and little entertainment in these forced conversations.

Then the improv begins. I'm going to show my arse here. It is a comedy form I'm not particularly immersed in. I loved Whose Line Is It Anyway? as a kid. I enjoyed the Edinburgh Improverts way back in the Miles Jupp days. I've supported a few friends when they edged away from stand-up and thought sketch and improv sports might better suit them. It has never really clicked with me. Have I kept up with current trends and developments? I'll hold my hands up. No.

The team came on and pretty much did two long rounds of rehearsed revolving door sketches. There were little skits deep at the centre that seem somewhat inspired by the suggestions churned dutifully up from the dating profiles we had explored. But in the main much had the air of being quite well practised, worn gently in. Whatever the inverse of off-the-cuff is?

So, the laugh worthy bits on ordering a water at Frankie & Benny's, Everest selfies, roommate rankings and stoned cops felt just a little too slick and ebullient to really convince as "in the moment". They notably bookended both sections of the show... so perhaps they take the form of bread, working slabs of loafy comedy to get in and get out of the actual MacGuyver stuff on a high. The flavoursome sandwich fillings about dumb dentists and mascot phobias made the room feel like they hadn't been sold a false bill of goods. These middle chunks were clearly inspired by the ladies from the audience's back stories. As for spontaneous performance though, it all maybe consisted of a generous 10% of the grandstanding we sat through. There wasn't a whole lot of Tinder flesh in the sausage entire.

It took a long while for the audience to warm up to the comedy component. Even I was a fair few beats along before I figured out exactly what was going on once the team of performers took over the stage. I found myself really enjoying the mechanics of a scene change. Someone would jump into a dying skit, wave some cast members on, push others back to the side lines and whisk us into a new scenario. I really dug the ballsy energy of someone reconfiguring the world with a purposeful few hand gestures. The audience and I soon became conditioned to look forward to when Laura and / or Rob were invited into a bit. Just as they seemed less slavish to what I imagine is the improv official playbook and more organically funny. They had a lot more natural charm in their back pockets. Sorry not to give them full name credits but it turns out another thing I'm on the backfoot about improv is where to find line-ups of a specific event online. Improv team members obviously value their social media privacy more than stand-ups. Which is ironic given the central hook of Dating Crapp.

"I'm looking for the aftershocks."

Fin Taylor's lips are pursed, his cheeks mockingly puffed up and he's nodding his head, absorbing any unease, teasing any rejection of his latest sensibility rattling bon mot. He's almost titivating the mock shock.

His hilarious routine on how a straight white man's options on making a living on Only Fans are limited is a puerile delight. His opener on the key differences between the Covid Vs Aids pandemics sets out his transgressive stall perfectly. And his barnstorming thoughts on the origins of The Blues feels about as risky as stand-up is going to get in 2023 and stay on the right side of intelligent and inarguably sound. You can't imagine The Stand allowing a tour show from a comedian who handled these subjects in anyway ham-fistedly.

What I love about Fin Taylor is he is a hard man to get a fix on. I don't think he's an automatic contrarian... He's certainly not dealing in ironic political incorrectness for "oohs" and "aahs" from an audience who should know exactly what they have bought a ticket for. If anything, there's a genuine disappointment on Taylor's face when he walks out in front of his Edinburgh full house and notes we are all white. I think he'd prefer a more challenging, less safe atmosphere to take his risks in. I would guess Taylor excels in dealing with the uncomfortable truth, knowing no take on the world is truly, entirely, binary right or wrong. Taking the long way around an unacceptable area and finding freedom in its fuzzy border seems to be his art.

To wit, he lists his absolute lack of beliefs and this makes up the muscular torso of his extended hour. This proves as efficient a delivery system for those 'uncomfortable truths' as any structure or device I've seen in a show all year. (This, Daddy Self-Care, is easily the best tour show I've had the pleasure of attending post-Fringe.) And to highlight just how funny it is, I only noted one lone sequence that might be considered worthy of a mere 4 stars rating instead of a steadfast glowing five across the board. His stuff on suicide is just as clever and abrasive but doesn't have quite such impact heavy punchlines as everything else broached. Still, suicide as a topic at the 45-minute dip when everything else has raised the roof... it is just nice to know Fin Taylor is human after all. Outstanding.

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