Dana Alexander arrives on this side of the Atlantic with a significant reputation, but the venue chosen for Alexander can only be described as ambitiously large for a comic at her first Fringe. Despite the tepidness of the small audience, Alexander initially cuts the figure of somebody utterly at ease on the stage, mixing routines that are whimsical with the genuinely dark. She’s a very accessible performer, one that would prefer the word ‘booty’ to ‘bottom’ and the kind of woman you’d genuinely like to go for a drink with (and it would probably be a pint at that). She’s also the only comic I’ve seen thus far that has managed to produce anything even vaguely humorous, if short-lived, about recent riotous events south of the border.After this initial promise though, Alexander had rather a difficult night. An unreceptive audience meant that the young Canadian felt compelled to prefix all her jokes with vacuous interjections like ‘it’s so messed up but...’ and ‘it’s the funniest thing...’, the former of which is invariably untrue when addressing reasonably banal issues and the latter of which should surely be for others to judge. It is true that the room was flatter than a white man’s booty (I can do middle of the range arse comedy too) but this did not justify an unappealing insistence that certain jokes were ‘good material’ when they tanked. Sadly, some bits just deserved to die on their booty. (Oh no he didn’t.)When such large swathes of material were not well received Alexander attempted to engage with the audience - asking members’ names, where they live and such. This was reasonably bearable until Alexander bantered with two Glaswegians in the front row. Here her lack of knowledge about the social complexities of the city was reminiscent of when you hear a politician talk about ‘the Facebook’ or ‘that Twitter’. It’s possible that this would have been a better show on a different night, but not on this occasion.
