Exercising those laughing muscles

Well, being the cheapskates that we are, we got 3 pairs of tickets for the preview week of the Fringe and thus spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights childfree and chortlesome.

Thursday night we saw Frankie Boyle and I have to say I was rather disappointed. The main reason for this is that several of his jokes had been on the previous week's Mock the Week and when we got home and watched the replay of that night's Mock the Week, there were most of the other jokes. This would seem to be the downside of being topical, but it still rankled rather. I would expect most fans of Frankie Boyle would watch Mock the Week, that being the show that he is known for. He was still funny, and a few of his jokes were shockingly and side splittingly politically incorrect (including referring to political correctness itself being "spastic gay talk"). A little difficult to like, he was offensive to just about everyone, but amusing all the same.



Friday night we saw Jason Byrne who is incredibly funny and adorably nice, I have no idea why he is not massively well known. He does a lot of audience participation (aka picking on the front row) which makes his show unique, but what makes him stand out is that he can talk about the most cliched of topics and make it really, really funny. Dylan Moran disappointed me a little last year when he started talking about parenthood, it just made him sound all grown up and a little middle aged even if he was being undoubtedly amusing. Jason Byrne however made parenthood sound like a fun adventure and while he has clearly matured somewhat from when we first saw him four years ago, he is no less funny. Everyone should see this man perform, he is funnier than anyone else I have ever seen (praise indeed as the first time I saw him was straight after Bill Bailey).

Saturday night we saw Russell Howard, also known for appearing on Mock the Week but, unlike Mr Boyle, did not resort to using the same jokes. This show was entitled "Adventures" and indeed he made everything he had done sound like a big adventure. He was accused by a heckler of "pissing and moaning" which was entirely unfair as he focussed a lot on the really good things in life. He was almost entirely free from being offensive, he was nice about most people, and he was endlessly extremely funny. I would recommend anyone to go and see this guy, you will come out with the biggest smile on your face and a sore side from laughing too much. He's only 26 and I sincerely hope he becomes a very big name in comedy, he's naturally brilliant.