James Trickey is an accountant but wants to chuck it all in to be come a full-time stand-up comedian. The mad fool. Or is he? I’m sure he’s done the number crunching and cost benefit analysis to work out which will be the most profitable career if his pivot is successful. And also he’s a very funny comedian.
In his debut full length show Trickey, also half of 2024 Sketch Off winners Burger and a Pint, leans in heavily on his geekiness and love of numbers and stats, which presumably was what partly pointed him in the direction of accountancy in the first place, along with his mother wanting him to have some financial security. He is pretty confident for a geek though and has a very logical mind, but sometimes, he explains, life gets in the way of being logical. Maybe it’s time to make the leap and take a few risks…
He may not be the only stand-up accountant, Fred MacAulay also ticks that box, but he has certainly got an interesting origin story. His father is English, his mother is Cambodian and there is a big age gap. Needless to say there’s some obvious humour here but Trickey mostly steers around it, instead painting a picture of his father’s unusual habits and his mother’s unusual accent, giving him an English name that she can’t actually pronounce.
Don’t Count On Me is a well-constructed hour that pulls together all sorts of intriguing disparate threads from his penchant for tomato puree to his fixation with Subway loyalty cards. If the comedy didn’t take off and he really wanted to quit accountancy he could probably get a job on Money Saving Expert.
At times it’s as if he is filling out a spreadsheet about his career options live onstage. But what could be a dry, nerdy exercise in dweebishness is made incredibly appealing by his winning style. Life is not all about calculations, he concludes, before finishing with a flash of unexpected humour showing that he is not entirely risk averse.
According to the show he has taken a chunk of time off work for this Edinburgh run. Is it really a calculated risk? Probably not and I imagine he knows it. I’m sure he has done the maths.
Read more Edinburgh comedy reviews here.
Until August 24. Tickets here.
Picture by Rebecca Need-Menear
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