Andrew Lawrence - Soul-Crushing Vicissitudes Of Fortune!

An individual walks onto the stage. He is short, wears a white shirt and black trousers, has ginger hair and looks like he’s just been sent out of a remedial French GCSE class. A few audience mutterings of “This can’t be him”, “That’s Andrew Lawrence?!” or quite simply “What?!” are pre-empted by the two-time if.comedy award nomination drawing attention to the fact that, “yes it is him, Andrew Lawrence, and that yes he does look like a 15 year old schoolboy, despite actually being double that age and having had time to be rejected by McIntyre’s masochistic road show”. Now let’s be honest, self depreciation is no new trick in the land of stand up comedians – Mark Watson has used it to great effect for some years now – but the result of it is still such that we form an immediate bond with our entertainer, one which Lawrence succeeds in building brilliantly throughout the hour.Lawrence’s style is conversational, and yet enigmatic at the same time leaving the only possible way for the audience to respond to be through laughter, guffawing your head off or crying in hysterics – as some old lady did just as Lawrence reached the punch of his filthiest line. Ironically, at one point Lawrence frankly declares “I brought the jokes. What did you bring? Nothing!” But of course in the intimate setting of the Queen Dome, we are actually the key to his show. An unappreciative audience would be tough for most comedians to deal with, but the rhythm and structure of Lawrence’s style – a continually building mini-rant at chance and how inevitably the difference between success and failure comes down to luck and not endeavour – makes it all the more important that the audience is on board from the very start. Thankfully his material is such that it’s hard to know how anyone could dislike him, and certainly almost impossible to imagine him performing in anything other than top capacity venues for much longer. Among his best lines are references to Gordon Ramsey as having “a face like a bag of crushed crabs”, reviewers being portrayed as being “creatively sterile and effectively a cancer” as well as referring to industry chiefs as “nepotistic charlatans”. His hysterical tirade at these individuals lead to his suggestion that in actually fact, he’d really rather be a bus driver.While there is no deep and meaningful message that one is left with from this show, the ultimate fact is that Andrew Lawrence is incredibly funny. He gains laugh after laugh, not through a few selected stories or jokes, but through a sustained show of frankness and hilarity. This man is possibly the funniest on the Fringe; it will be an extraordinary vicissitude of fortune if you can still get a ticket.