Free comedy is like cinema pick n’ mix. For every chocolate peanut you find there’s another liquorice allsort. So Liam and Owen’s Cracking One Off Show straddled the fine line between entertainment and repetition. Playing to a packed room of amiably tipsy punters at the Grassmarket’s Beehive Inn, there were several laughs that made it worth popping in to see.
The structure of the show was two bouts of stand up, each lasting about half-an-hour. The first up was Liam Withnail, ‘from a small town outside Edinburgh called Dagenham’. Despite having a voice as croaky as Chewbacca the morning after Hogmanay, the comedy was delivered at a breakneck speed and there were some great scenes, such as a curiously safety-conscious mugger in Brixton and some decent interaction with the audience. One geographically-specific member was labelled ‘Captain Tomtom’ to the great amusement of the audience. The main problem was nervousness. The jokes meandered into anecdotes about drinking and some of the prepared jokes, including one particularly self-conscious one about his girlfriend, fell a bit flat.
If Liam sounded like Chewbacca then Owen, with a floppy mass of hair that he later did up in a ponytail, actually looked like him. Owen’s sarcastic weighted delivery was a change from Liam’s 100mph approach and some of his anecdotes, like growing up in a grim Scottish town and how Edinburgh isn’t all that nice a place, were delivered with panache. However, his main problem was structure. He was constantly diverted from stories to rants, which led to long lists of things he didn’t like including a spiel on Facebook that would have been current in 2008. It’s true that the nature of live comedy is totally different and slightly less structured than its plasticised panel form but at times transitions were clunky. However, with a sharper focus on material, these two could very quickly hone their obvious talent.
