Mitch Benn: The Point – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Mitch Benn: The Point continues at Underbelly, Bristo Square – Jersey until 28 August 2023.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Mitch Benn is probably best remembered for his musical contributions to BBC Radio’s The Now Show and others. Clever pastiches. He does fine take-offs of ‪‘Sexual Healing’ here and ‪‘The Joker’. He’s a smashing singer and a good mimic, his lyrics are excellent.

In this show, he strives to find The Point, the point being “What is the point of comedy? What does it do?” He then proceeds to investigate it, promising not to present a history of comedy, which he then immediately does via a clever rap survey of the genre from the Greeks onwards.

There is a little sense here of preaching to the converted: we’re all here for comedy – he’s a comedian.

The show zigzags through a series of themes, some related, some not – his professional standing as a musician-comedian, which he says is valued as below stand-up; politics (he claims to be non-partisan); the question of Scottish independence: an uneasy moment when many of the audience jeered his suggestion that independence was inevitable, which led to his appealing to his Scots genealogy.

This last episode highlighted another moment when one of the audience provided the punchline to a joke Benn was about to deliver. “I’m the comedian here! Do that again and I’ll…” and proceeded to describe in graphic terms what he would do to the heckler. It didn’t get a lot of laughs and there was anger in his voice.

Or maybe there wasn’t. He tends to have a shouty delivery. And starey eyes. But maybe they were that way because of the venue. He protested that he could see only the tops of the heads of the front row because of the bright lighting, which resulted in a fixed focus on somewhere at the back which gave the impression that he was addressing an imaginary audience. I know it’s difficult when blinded by stage lights, but surely he has enough experience to at least pretend and include the whole audience.

He accompanies himself on guitar, sometimes with backing tracks, sometimes with loops. As I said, the songs are very clever, the wordplay great, he’s a good singer. The audience loved him.

I was happy about the songs. I wasn’t so sure about the man.

James Bryce