Effervescent comic and sometime Irish TV face Niamh Marron delivers an unpolished and often forced hour of fairly standard comedy material with occasional witty zingers being the only bits that lift the show.
The set could be improved by giving thought to how the material could be both shocking to sensibility and surprising to sense.
Marron’s opening patter is largely observational with a tired joke about the ovine-oriented sexual habits of Welshmen thrown in, and is followed by a series of anecdotes about occasions she has embarrassed herself. Her energy and pace are high, which does match her material well. Delivering it without the aid of pre-written notes would help smooth over clunky segues.
Marron frequently uses crude or shocking lines and then punctuates them with a 'What?!' or a 'D’y’know what I mean?! With careful application this could be reminiscent of Yakko’s famous Animaniacs catchphrase, 'Good night everybody!'. But the key to shock humour is surprise, and Marron’s gags feature such old staples as paedophile priests and Stephen Hawking attempting to ice-skate that this delivery technique becomes more like a mannerism from Eric Idle’s irritating 'Nudge nudge, wink wink' character in the Python sketch 'Candid Photography.'
Frequently recurring ableist gags are examples of jokes that are shocking in the sense that they go against supposedly dominant standards but are common and old enough to be unsurprising – and therefore unfunny. The occasional lines that work are the ones that come out of the blue; the set could be improved by giving thought to how the material could be both shocking to sensibility and surprising to sense.
Stand Up Chameleon is not terrible, but with a whole Fringe of other comics to pick from there is little here that is fresh, interesting or worth recommending.
