If Michael McIntyre’s production-line slickness is not to your taste, relax, there are alternatives. In recent years there has been a trend for comedy characters who are both intentionally awful and subversively hilarious. Welcome to the world of the anti-stand-up.
Ed Aczel is a leading light of this wave, alongside America’s more established Neil Hamburger and fellow Brits Brian Gittins and Angelos Epethemious. Ambling onstage to an ironic introduction welcoming "Mr Showbusiness", this intriguing 42-year-old promptly admitted that he had done no preparation whatsoever.
This was, of course, a conceit to allow him to meander through set-pieces based on his fruitless attempts to solve the world’s problems. There’s no answer to climate change here but there are genuine gags about Wittgenstein and the Myth of Sisyphus, suggesting that this scruffy oddball spends more time reading than bothering Mr Armani.
Some moments are cutely inventive, others work less well. Aczel is at his best when in control of the gentle mayhem, drawing quirky graphs on his flipchart, offering ridiculous raffle prizes or doing an impromptu Steve McQueen impression. He is less effective at building rapport. He does not so much work the room as ease it into a slightly unsettled state.
I cannot see him following Michael McIntyre and playing the O2 Arena. Or even getting a job selling fries there. But comedy buffs with a taste for the harmlessly absurd will be charmed.
29 and 30 January. Information: 020 7478 0100, www.sohotheatre.com
Edward Aczel: Explains All The World's Problems... And Then Solves Them
Soho Theatre
Dean Street, W1D 3NE
