Catherine Bohart / Craig Wilson - Bobby Carroll's Glasgow Comedy Diary: Day One

Written by: Bobby Carroll
Published: Tuesday 25th March 2025

Riding a career high, an on-fire Catherine Bohart opens to a packed sticky floor night club basement with the tantalising well-worn gambit of "So you're probably wondering how I got here..." Giving us a narrative flash forward to a penultimate chapter bus ride... where she has a dead stuffed squirrel on her lap... and hopes this morbid curio will somehow save her latest relationship.... with no immediate context. We are bursting with questions? Then again, so is Catherine.

First she wants to get to know her audience. Mark out a few stooges to bounce gags off of and squeeze out some one-night-only gossip to keep the show fresh. This Glasgow audience are reticent about banter. Happy to answer from the darkness but too timid to engage with any follow up. It leaves Bohart repeating teasingly "Who Woo'd!? Who woo'd..." at one point, like a gleefully glitching owl.

She keenly craves interaction with her fans. She has included a bounty of opportunities for wriggle room which she clearly plans to work to her chatty, in-the-moment strengths. The Òran Mór punters wait out the whole first section to warm to the concept of being a conspiratorial part of the show. Much to Bohart's bemused but composed chagrin. She unlocks their chastity belts after the interval and Again With Feelings flows a lot more fluidly. Spunkily even. There is a rare intimacy that she builds with the audience which means the surprise encore is her coming back on stage a third time and getting to the bottom of a few conversations she enjoyed but cut short to keep the material flowing.

A digression. You can chart most longlife male comedians' touring careers through a steady progression of hours about life events. The messy break up show; the marriage show; the dead dad show; the "Now I'm a dad" show; the divorce show; the rehab show; the cancer scare / heart attack show; the even more doomed to failure second marriage to someone much younger show; the now my kid's a stand-up / famous show. For male comedians, some combination of these shared milestones measures out their academic fringe years like rings on a hacked down tree trunk. Bohart's latest is a zippy, zesty reappropriated mash-up of three of these well-trodden arcs. She has a younger partner. And she is window shopping the game changers of marriage and pregnancy. Celebrating the fact these are both take it or leave it choices for her. "But like all Irish women I can't go into a shop without buying something."

Just about anything can stress Bohart out and watching her pressure race up to the red zone again and again is a stand-up miracle. When she builds a head of steam her flighty flinty speaking style goes into compulsive overdrive. Those racing, tip toe dancing steps always culminate in a stampede, often a big growling smasher of a punchline. There's a barnstormer about a found plate and a bit that clicked about her mammy's gifting of any and every item in her house decades before she is due to die. Her controversial thoughts on the overconfident sons of lesbian couples are scarily accurate. Made me laugh loudly at the risk she took speaking truth to her market share. One example of how wonderfully she can tee up a laugh through building anticipation.

It shall not damage her talent nor her ticket sales to state that Bohart does occasionally indulge in 'Last Dinner Party' feminism to stoke the room. Telling women who live in relative privilege exactly what they desire to hear about men and sexuality and other generalisations in a space that isn't as truly inclusive at it would first appear. She even points out double standards of her wanting to enjoy the benefits of being the older partner without the associated cringe men endure and angling to be the "dad" figure in the potential parenting duo as the pressure is apparently off. Yet her mode of humour mainly eschews point scoring.

And then the risqué glories.

Bohart finds massive laughs in the second half by getting dirty. Dissecting dishonest sperm donors, massages with strings attached and, of course, explaining that dead squirrel on a bus. Regaling us with a labyrinthine tale of a lesbian relationship with ghosting, intrigue and shocks that could fill five copies of Take A Break. All the while circling hypothetical incest (it is a recurring theme that sneaks up with surprising regularity through the show) with a constant disruptive tease. For someone who rarely swears on stage, and looks like every girl from Irish dancing lessons I had a boyhood crush over, she sure can mix it up in some very mucky areas.

Craig Wilson: Who? sees a fine young comic in a fugly shirt trying to stand out. It looks like a screensaver from yesteryear; he looks like everyone and no one in particular. His performance has some of the tics and quirks of James Acaster and the lateral thought patterns of Mitch Hedberg.

This is small life whimsy. Wilson is so anonymous looking nobody recognises him, much less remembers him. It is a pretty diaphanous conceit to assemble a showcase hour of material around. He has a banging gag about being the Easter Egg face in a game of 'Guess Who?' and, later, a yarn on pretending to be an unlikely celeb at a party proves packed. I'm guessing these are the pre-existing bits from his working club set and much else that happens is launched off these. Musings under the notebook heading 'Who?'. A roadshow length redux of his strongest material, perhaps?

Wilson is a lo-fi quirkster and about 25% of his Billy Liar / Walter Mitty departures feel just for him and the "kids in the hall". His left of field thoughts around David Carradine's kinky death needs a few more hours in the new material night incubator to make sense. Even when something doesn't land his tender yet urgent delivery style sidesteps desperation rather smoothly. Yeah... he admits there are way too many callbacks, but none of them are forced. He evidences a genuine understanding of using joined up thinking to create rhythm over an hour.

There is treasure. Wilson's funniest unbelievable waffle sees him never being picked for the school football squad, only taken to OTT lengths. A skit involving a raver who cannot believe he has hands personally wowed me stupid. And when there isn't treasure, there's at least always the glint of originality, the weight of absurdity. Tentative gems. I'll be sure to remember Craig Wilson, and the next time I catch him I hope he is digging even deeper into his thoughts for the incredulous rather than worrying about overarching concepts.

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