There's a lot of love at the Fringe

Stalking, manscaping, getting naked on Skype, dating audience members and writing songs for sex addicts – looks like romance is alive and well at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe

WHEN STAND-UPS tackle subjects as topical as negative equity, as idiosyncratic as sans-serif fonts and as eccentric as near-drowning incidents involving home-made helicopters, it can seem passe for performers to wallow in romance. Sex is funny, obviously – it’s got shock value, slapstick and farce on its side – but love?

In his show What is Love Anyway, the comedian-cynic Richard Herring declares that his mission is "to destroy love". It's "just two stalkers in synchronicity," he insists. This is perhaps a good time to mention that Herring is 44 and mildly misanthropic. But it soon becomes apparent that, rather being out of love with love, it is merely its conventions that irk him. Three years into the most serious relationship of his life, Herring is wondering whether "to shit or get off the pot". He sounds quite relaxed on his pot, making it harder to be properly acerbic.

Peep Showactress Isy Suttie, meanwhile, isn't even attempting any acrid notes in her character comedy Pearl and Dave, a love story between a gruff accountant and the married object of his affection. It's one of those Friends Reunited-type cliches about young lovers who reconnect later in life when it's all got a bit complicated and bittersweet. They get naked on Skype, but they're shy about it.

The laughs got thicker when I went to see Andi Osho, who after three years of singledom has built up 50-plus minutes of jokes about disastrous dating. In one bedroom encounter, she claimed to have set the clock on her sleeping lover’s phone forward two hours so he would leave. “And HTC phones are not easy to navigate,” she appealed to the crowd for sympathy. “Then I thought to myself, ‘what are you doing, Andi?’” shaking her head. “It’s his house.”

Osho's show, All the Single Ladies,has a class-A gimmick: after each performance she goes on a date with one of the men in the audience. So far, however, her volunteers have tended to be too young, too short, too gay or too married. Who'd have thought? It's a fun hour in a cabaret bar. But where's the pain? Where's the heart, crushed and mashed and dumped on the floor? It turns out it's in the hands of 20 teenagers from Glasgow youth theatre group Junction 25, who have been picking up accolades for their show I Hope My Heart Goes First,in which a succession of tomatoes are mangled and pulped between their fingers.

Elsewhere, the musicals of the fringe took on the subject with pitch-perfect black comedy and oxytocin-levels of joy. "You never really know someone," sang Lucy Cox, the star of Rom Com Wrong,"until you've stalked the hell out of them." I thought the second row was a safe enough place to sit until the stars of Wasted Lovesang a number with the refrain "aren't you glad I'm not a killer?" directly at me, with doolally choreography and an unnerving level of eye contact. For sheer glee, though, it's hard to beat its premise: a musical set in a meeting of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.

As far as the stand-ups went, I was still waiting for a hand-in-mouth confessional, informed by messy vulnerability rather than easy misanthropy or safe storytelling. And that's when Russell Kane, last year's winner of the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award, pranced in. Manscapingis his five-star attempt to recover his identity after his recent divorce. It's left him feeling like a shape-shifting monster that has lost human form and is taking on a thousand different faces as it reverts to type.

Kane (31) doesn’t do stalking gags, but kitchen floor floundering. He wants to be in a relationship that’s somewhere in between “that blob shape” where the couple has “lost all dynamic” and “that hard shape” that’s cold and unconnected. And along the way, he’s going to spew out arrows of honesty.

"I found myself actively looking for women with low self-esteem," he says, darting around the stage like an ITV2 dandy in a Topshop scoop-neck. Misguided friends and publicists would try to set him up with glamour models. But how would that help? The physically shrinking Kane was "obviously more into girls like Natalie Portman at her lowest ebb in Black Swan."

The comedian's comedianswho do Irish acts recommend

Conor O'Toole

20-year-old Dubliner and graphic designer whose sophomore set Manual of Style is a feast of font-related pedantry

“Claudia O’Doherty, I love Claudia. She’s so surreal. Her show last year is by far my favourite fringe show ever. This year, sadly, the whole thing is in Arial, so it’s mixed emotions for me. And her poster is a mix of Arial and Helvetica. That’s like a duet between Thom Yorke and Chris Martin – you can tell that one of them just isn’t right. Simon Munnery is always incredible. He’s doing a musical about the R101 airship disaster. I love things that are very specific like that.”

Tara Flynn

Ex-Nuala and just-returned emigrant whose comedy songs hour, Big Noise, is at the fringe

“The act on after me, Fraser Millward, is fantastic. Let me think . . . I’m going to see an American performer called Lach tonight. Basically he founded the anti-folk movement that spawned Beck and Regina Spektor and he’s doing his own solo show here, so that’s a little hidden gem. He has a very funny and poetic use of words. Wendy Wason, she’s brilliant, and Bridget Christie is possibly my favourite show I’ve seen so far.”

Keith Farnan

Ex-solicitor from Cobh whose recession-themed show Money Money Money will be broadcast by RTÉ

“Glenn Wool’s show is just sublime. It’s so funny, from nought to 60 all the way through. But he’s been doing this for 13 or 14 years, you know – people would know him from doing gigs in Ireland. I’m not really big into sketch, but it’s great to see Irish sketch groups coming through. There’s one group called No Pants Thursday – this is their first year in Edinburgh and I really hooted through most of the show.”

Reviews

David O’Doherty is Looking Up

David O’Doherty hasn’t been a fan of 2011. He’s been mugged twice, suffered a weight-decimating stomach infection and left the 18-34 demographic. Thankfully, he’s still got his mini-keyboard (plus an actual piano) to sing songs about wrist-emulsifying creams and birthday-celebrating sharks, all while wearing a fetching gold cape. His traditional “beefs” closing rant marks the peak of his consistent hilarity and is delivered with rasping panache. ****

Claudia O’Doherty: What is Soil Erosion?

As well as being the co-author of 100 Facts about Pandasand the forthcoming 100 Facts about Sharkswith her namesake David, Claudia O'Doherty is an impressive Australian comic who seamlessly maintains the persona of a deluded would-be television presenter whose proposal for a 26-part geology series has been rejected. By the end, she has her audience chanting "rill, gully, sheet" as if it's all perfectly normal. (They're types of erosion.) ****

Dave Gorman’s Powerpoint Presentation

Gorman’s shows are like public reports of his research into the more ludicrous elements of modern life, the highlight here being his “work” on smartphone marketing avatars. It’s all too easy to guess the punchlines in the first half, but in the second there are delicious moments when the amiable Gorman purposefully allows the audience to anticipate where his routine is going – an altogether superior feeling. He plays Dublin and Belfast in November. ***