We’re not seeing the best of Andrew Bird tonight, I suspect. He tells us as much – repeatedly. His wife down south has just given birth prematurely (the heartless audience, containing no Americans, gives no woops or cheers) and he’s just rushed back on the plane and so is knackered. What’s more, half his set is redundant, dealing as it did with his wife’s pregnancy. Surely he could have tweaked it – dude, haven’t you heard of changing tenses? It’s a shame because Bird is a natural on stage. He’s amiable, funny and great company. On the basis of tonight, though, he doesn’t have the material to back it up. I felt I’d like to see him for 20 minutes at a comedy club but that he wasn’t yet ready to entertain an Edinburgh crowd for an hour, in one of the Gilded Balloon’s hottest rooms. As is often the way with comedians’ 60-minute shows, Bird has felt the need to find a premise to hang his routines on. In his case it’s the fact he played a few village halls in Northamptonshire (the county of his birth) but he really only talks about this for a few minutes. There’s no beginning, middle and end to it; it just appears and then disappears. But there’s lots of good stuff here. I liked his analysis of parish newsletters, and he’s on form when talking about dogs humping legs.
