Adam Hess: Salmon

★★★
comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
Published 12 Aug 2015
33331 large
39658 original

To begin: a warning to fish-lovers. There's nothing about salmon in this show. Which is a surprise, really, because there's pretty much everything else in a set which sees Hess deliver roughly two hours of material in the space of a short hour. Bloody hell he doesn't stop for a moment. Light and shade is not Hess's strong suit. But torrents of well-crafted jokes, beautifully OTT anecdotes (by way of justification: "the boy who cried wolf is fucking famous now, isn't he!") and off-kilter observations ("he used to clean his teeth with hot water and now he works for google, so fuck everything") most certainly are.

There's little by way of a bigger agenda here. Hess is more than content to over-exaggerate, lie, and cheat in the pursuit of laughs. And it works. So what if the pooh story didn't actually happen (probably) – its retelling is a marvellous piece of verbal and physical theatre. So what if the music box is as lame a prop as you're likely to see – it gets the giggles.

This is standup as you've seen it before, and would pay good money to see again. Jokes delivered with verve, swagger, and all of the other things you get from someone young with serious talent. It's not big or weighty but, hell, what do you expect from a twenty-something year-old living away from his parents for the first time? Gogol?