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Are funny bones inherited? This year's Fringe seems to be swamped with comedy offspring with the progeny of Jan Ravens, Rory McGrath and Jennifer Saunders among those appearing here. And then there is 30-year-old Camilla Cleese, who at over six foot has certainly inherited her father John’s long legs if not his quintessentially English sense of red-faced outrage. Luckily she must have inherited her mother Barbara Trentham’s looks, part-Jerry Hall supermodel, part-prize-winning stallion.
Cleese played it safe on her Edinburgh debut, sticking to a short set as part of this American…ish package show. She came on first, which suggested that she was the weakest link, but she certainly had the strongest material, drawing heavily on her family history: “I’m still single and it’s weird because my parents set an amazing example. They’ve been married for almost 42 years – to seven different people.”
The frisson that everyone knew who her father was was both a plus and a minus. It was a little like Prince Charles doing a stand-up set about his parents. But there were certainly rich pickings as she got various gripes off her chest, mocking assorted stepmums with some slickly penned put-downs. There were also some pokes at short men and an edgy gags about Oscar Pistorius, who is also pretty short without his prosthetic legs The delivery did, however, feel overly scripted at times with not a lot of room to manoeuvre. It was OK for a club set, but I suspect that any longer and it might have outstayed its welcome.
Next up was Cort McCown who is a regular at the Hollywood Comedy Store and did the kind of material one would have expected from a middle-aged T-shirted Comedy Store regular. It was universal schtick, moaning about the fact that the problem these days is that we don't beat our children enough and are too busy giving them prizes for coming seventh instead.
There were some tart observations about how to spot and pick up the weaker women in nightclubs and, as feels mandatory for US comedians, he told us how long he had been sober. All of which is not to say McCown was bad. He was slick, tight and knew how to work a crowd. It was just that there was nothing to make him distinctive. But who knows? If Louis CK was in this package maybe he wouldn’t stand out either.
The final act Sarah Tiana had a similar problem. She largely played the thirtysomething singleton card and did little to stretch boundaries. When she noticed she was not getting that many laughs she started to wonder if her references did not translate. They did, it was just that the audience was not finding them that amusing. In the end she flicked through her mental rolodex and came up with routine about the tyranny of internet pornography, pointing out that not every real-life woman likes everything that crops up online. Hardly the most showstopping riff in the history of the Edinburgh Fringe, but bought her enough credit to end the gig on a good-sized laugh.
This show closed on August 13.
