Andrew Maxwell: Slight Return

We can thank the clowns and pretty colours for Andrew Maxwell doing a few Fringe gigs after all. It was actually his young daughter’s enthusiasm for Edinburgh at festival time that persuaded him to shelve the planned year off, but what with the Brexit fallout and Donald Trump rampaging across America, it would seem oddly remiss not to get Maxwell’s take on things right now.

Even with matters that are relatively current, you can rely on him to have some fine, thoughtful material ready to go. When the London riots rocked the Fringe agenda in August 2011, for example, Maxwell was the man unafraid to completely rearrange his set. Here, though, he looks a tad deflated by recent events, slumping onto his chair at the sheer stupidity of it all.

He’s clearly been too immersed in the news for his own good, but still offers one of the sharper summaries of the referendum decision: there’s an interesting fact about Britain’s trade dealings with Ireland, followed by a zinger, and a brilliantly cutting assessment of who was responsible for that result.

The well-travelled comic then moves onto the world generally, from the States to a sauna in Finland, but he’s really talking about people: our differences and similarities. That’s particularly relevant for Maxwell personally as he’s now married to an Egyptian Muslim woman—a fact that many audiences apparently don’t believe—which offers him both an interesting added insight and licence to make jokes that other comics probably wouldn’t.

But then Maxwell was always like that anyway. It’s good to belatedly have him back.