Pat Cahill: Start

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You could never accuse Chortle’s Best Newcomer for 2012 Pat Cahill of laziness in creating and especially memorising Start – quite possibly the wordiest comedy show on the Fringe this year. But therein lies its weakness too. The London comic’s various, very involved spiels and songs are written with a try-hard, rapid-fire immersion in detail which seems to have distracted from the broader strokes of how fundamentally funny any of it actually is. Cahill’s growing one-to-watch repute draws a capacity crowd, but more than a few confused expressions are conspicuously furrowing brows as the hour wears on.

On one hand it's kind of Cockney vaudevillian song-and-dance routines with a weird contemporary twist, set not to ukulele and washboard but banging garage beats or French electro, covering subjects from necking Jaegerbombs to nervous breakdowns. On another it’s fuzzy surrealism, typified by his neck-mounted microphone brace homemade out of a coat-hanger, which wobbles away amusingly in front of him throughout the show.

Credit to Cahill for trying to do something unconventional – it’s not that Start is fundamentally bad, but it's just frustratingly never that good. There’s simply precious little that’s obviously laugh-out-loud humorous about, say, his list of birds-stuffed-inside-birds Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall style, or the bit when he stuffs his face with chewing gum so as to slow his speech down for added profundity as he talks. As his intended pièce de résistance about blowing-up your troubles in a fuck-it balloon typically fails to excite much of a response, it’s Cahill’s hype that looks inflated.