You’ve got to bless the Edinburgh audience, they are a godsend for bad comedians. Generous with their laughter and even applause, they shouldn’t ask more of us at a bad gig. So when the host of the show came on stage and started painfully pumping the room for as much applause, cheering and laughter as he could I started to get annoyed. Those kind of reactions should be earned, not demanded before the show has begun. Sure enough, the crowd went for it anyway, but as the show went on it became apparent that the three title acts, Dixon, Fogg and Green, weren’t going to earn the enthusiastic welcomes we were giving them.
Nick Dixon delights in being a little creepy with his slow, quiet delivery and jokes that skirt alongside the edge of his comfort zone, touching on barely sexist, barely racist jokes and talking about his family. Some of his lines were okay and got the laughs they deserved, but overall he needs to throw his material out a bit further, be more daring and enthusiastic about it.
Dave Green has unique delivery - after the shouts of the returning compere his long pause, followed by monotone, quiet delivery created a great interruption to the flow and if he’d immediately used material that suited the voice he would have had us on the hook. However, his material didn’t match up to his delivery until close to the end where he started exploring the idea of talking to darkness. This more brooding humour which got more abstract suited his style more than his opening gags.
Ben Fogg came onto the stage with a twitchy energy, throwing around lots of wordplay within mediocre material in his tracksuit-suit. He was probably gained the most laughs of the lot, but to be honest if there hadn’t been two girls who laughed hysterically at every sentence the trio uttered there wouldn’t have been much at all.
