The little guy floundering at life is a well-worn – and evergreen, in the right hands – comedy persona. Ian Smith’s are those right hands at this year’s fringe, and with Crushing (now nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award) he delivers an intensely funny and peevish set about his mission to destress after a breakup. No, wait: “It’s not a breakup show,” he keeps telling us, and fair enough, it’s seldom mentioned. But it helps in this agitated hour – as the Goole man laments the recent history of his Blackpool hotel room, the patronising attitude of posh southerners and the oddity of teeth – to remember the context in which all this tension is mounting.
The act that Crushing brings most to mind is Rhod Gilbert, another comic who loses his rag at innocuous everyday predicaments. Smith doesn’t ascend to Gilbert’s levels of volcanic fury; tetchiness is more his mode. But he makes it just as entertaining – see the for-the-ages scene set in a flotation tank that promises to reduce Smith to mere “thoughts in the darkness”, not a prospect that much alleviates his anxiety. Another fine set-piece, including a painstaking act-out, sees Smith pay his respects to a man who finds a dogged way to rebel when sacked from his job at a vineyard.
Give or take a few of those third-person stories – including one that, slightly incongruously, closes the show – Smith makes himself the butt of all these jokes, as he finds himself cast as unnamed Boring Creep in a TV show, and stands accused online of mispronouncing the letter H. As with that last gag, the devil of Smith’s comedy is in the detail he excavates (his accuser’s previous social media silence, in this instance) that multiply his stress and indignity by 10. None of this is stressful for the audience, mind you, because the 34-year-old’s miffedness is never so total as to preclude laughing along at this or that latest enfeeblement.
There’s nothing feeble, though, about the act of violent therapy that concludes the show, in a tank, in Bratislava. Nor about Crushing’s steamroller comic effectiveness; there are few shows as purely funny as this on the fringe.
At Monkey Barrel at the Tron, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
