Tania Edwards opens by criticising the elderly. Billed an hour later than last year, she heralds her 4:35pm slot as a game-changer – it immediately attracts a younger audience. A phrase she may later regret when the 13-year-olds have to sit through her pornography section.
Edwards is climbing up the comedy circuit’s heavily contested rungs.
The British comic is quick to include an accent qualifier: ‘And no, I haven’t trotted into Edinburgh on Daddy’s pony’, she says with a polite yet sinister smile. Not a pony, but a limo perhaps – Edinburgh Festival is the newlywed’s self-confessed honeymoon.
Her set proceeds to discuss her rather lovely life. Freshly married to a skinny Indian man she can’t understand – ‘he’s from Belfast’ – Edwards has not yet reached the cynical stage. Very honourably, she focuses her misanthropy on pornography, political correctness and grooming instead.
After naming the show Electrifying, it’s slightly unfortunate that most of her jokes fail to fizz. There are glimmers of hilarity throughout but punchlines ultimately aren’t well delivered. With her fragile voice and slight movements, Edwards is apologising for her wit rather than performing it. Her humour receives titters consistently but never unanimous laughter. It’s a little too tame for that.
In this particular show, the fact that there were a few 13-year-olds in the audience (the age rating is 14+) seemed to throw Edwards off-kilter. She signposted her imminent pornography section with awkward embarrassment and from then on, she seemed to struggle.
Stories are mostly well constructed but come across disjointed. She consistently breaks to ask the audience questions in the vein of ‘Do you watch porn?’ Which other than extracting an initial giggle, do little to add to the intelligence of her material.
There is no doubt that Edwards is climbing up the comedy circuit’s heavily contested rungs, but this show is nowhere near as funny as it should be.
