Stevie Martin’s show weighs up the differences between live and online comedy. Her career began in the former, as a third of Massive Dad, and has flourished in the latter, where her sketches with Lola Rose Maxwell have garnered a gazillion views. So why return to the stage? Particularly when (as per one unfortunate headline in this newspaper) comedy can no longer get by on laughs alone?
You could consider Clout as Martin’s one-woman campaign to prove that, actually, it can – and it’s resoundingly successful. Because our host sees the above questions not as opportunities for chin-strokey discussion, but to tee up a tricksy and silly tech-comedy hour, presented by a woman who may have managed to haul herself back on stage, but not to forego her screens while doing so.
That’s understandable. Martin has some fun up top here, itemising the advantages of making comedy online, which cannot be replicated (and she tries, to prove the point) on stage. There’s effort-reward ratio (as one clip drolly demonstrates, our host is “doing so well online for doing so little”) and the analytics available to model online success. Might those be mapped on to the live arena? You can bet Martin gives that a go too, anatomising this show moment by moment with various on-screen grids and graphs.
You won’t need the AV support, happily, to know that Clout is flying by, buoyed by arch good humour and high-quality gags tightly packed inside other gags, ready to jack-in-the-box out and multiply the surprise. (None more so than her spoof final reveal about the show’s hidden framework.) So we get pert routines about the three types of Shakespeare play, the embarrassment of excavating one’s historical tweets, and a running joke about horses that resemble lamps.
You could mine this for Martin’s probably real anxieties, glancingly referenced here, about the impossibility of originality in comedy, and her unease with sharing autobiographical stories on stage. But no trace of anxiety survives in the performance, which cheeringly demonstrates that funny is quite enough to sustain a comedy show – at least when it’s as ingenious and endearing as this.
At Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, until 25 August
