As far as I can tell, US comic Patti Harrison’s bizarre, rambling, sometimes brilliant Edinburgh debut is the only stand-up show at the entire Fringe that doesn’t have a name.
It’s just another disorientating detail to said untitled show, which purports to be a work-in-progress - but I’m about 85 percent sure isn’t - which wilfully drifts on far beyond its allotted hour – it was close to 90 minutes when I saw it – and in which Harrison presents herself as a wholesome, overly sincere, post-therapy type who shouts out to her sponsors, refuses to tell any jokes and instead naval gazes about stuff like her struggles during lockdown or the boring similarities between comics and musicians.
I’m pretty sure it’s all an elaborate construct, though, the return of our old friend anti-comedy - something I’d surmised from Harrison’s involvement with weirdy Netflix sketch show ‘I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson’. But I can imagine somebody walking in totally cold might wonder who this strange, self-obsessed, non-joke-telling woman was.
The laughs do come when her po-faced, self-regarding patter slips into the surreal: no spoilers, but the point when she describes what’s allegedly really on her pad of work-in-progress notes had the room howling incredulously; the content warning section at the start gradually builds from ‘is she serious?’ to complete madness, largely due to the sponsorship of the company ‘Noise Barn’; and then there are the looks of loathing she shoots any audience member who tries to interact with her, even when asked. The real giveaway is the songs, which she introduces with total sincerity and always turn out to be completely bonkers, like the one ‘in the style of Kate Bush if Kate Bush was really a Tory’, or the closing number, a thank you to the show’s other ‘sponsor’ Toyota, in the style of Charli XCX.
When Patti Harrison says laugh, we all laugh. But splitting sides is clearly not her number one priority here. I can’t help but think that if the show was the length it was supposed to be and that the cuts were made from the intentionally unfunny bits, you’d have something pretty amazing on your hands. As it is, this untitled show can be pretty frustrating – but it’s also magnificently uncompromising.
