Joanna Neary Does Animals and Men

Fun for fun's sake

★★★
comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
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Published 19 Aug 2016
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We’re all creative these days. The adverts tell us so. We shop for rose-covered tote bags at Cath Kidston, and Kirstie Allsopp makes things that look like Cath Kidston rejects. Instagram filters turn our holiday snaps into screen tests from Warhol’s Factory, and if you don’t mind I’m late for my hot yoga life drawing class. Creativity is a badge you can wear, a marketable asset, a lifestyle, in the way that magazines and Apple Macs are a lifestyle.

Joanna Neary is actually creative, in the true sense that she mucks about in order to muck about. Even in a soulless venue, the kind of room you would slip into to cry at a wedding reception, it’s all delightfully silly. Neary opens with an explanation of "intrusive thoughts" – the sudden interjection of darkness into an otherwise sunny outlook. And many of her characters are about weirdness and mania infecting the mundane: Björk in suburbia, Kirstie Allsopp’s reign of terror.

But mostly this is about the simple joy of making up songs about lightbulbs and miming along to Miley Cyrus. Some of it doesn’t work (there’s an overarching joke about PowerPoint presentations that would seem like a parody of other Fringe shows if she wasn’t so well meaning) and some of it leaves you breathless with laughter. Her impression of Celia Johnson from Brief Encounter as a yearning modern housewife is the kind you’ll immediately try (and fail) to imitate for your friends. It’s not sellable, but it is a lot of fun.