With Orange Crush, Ivo Graham guarantees us both his finest ever standup set, or a colour-coordinated breakdown. I’m unsure it’s both. Having been requested “What’s your favorite color?” by his six-year-old child, this present riffs on Graham’s fondness for orange – which doesn’t precisely scream standup with one thing important to say. However he roams across the topic entertainingly sufficient, in an hour addressing Wotsits and Irn-Bru, his mom’s MS and his function within the marketing campaign to avoid wasting Swindon City soccer membership.
Alongside that materials, Graham is bracingly outspoken on Palestine, to which trigger he additionally lends his assist. All of which, together with his newfound suavity and up to date rebranding (tongue in cheek or in any other case) as merely “Ivo”, made me surprise: whither the shy and self-abasing Graham of yesteryear? It mightn’t have been a lot enjoyable to stay, nevertheless it was a compelling comedian persona – whereas Ivo 2.0, 34 years outdated and with a little bit of swagger, is tougher to understand.
Not that he’s grown out of awkwardness. The tales right here loop round reveals of Graham’s favorite orange issues (“It’s time to carry the primary cloche of the night …”), and the primary finds him banging into an outdated flame whereas driving a very manky Lime bike. In one other, his plan is thwarted to pester Nick Hornby at a VIP dinner. There are one or two clunky viewers interactions, too, that our host frets about greater than is critical. On the flipside, a cocky visible gag offsets any Orange Order anxieties among the many Scottish crowd; after which there’s his “I’m the highest Ivo” materials, evaluating himself to his humbler namesakes.
One such is the rapper Drake (full title: Aubrey Drake Graham), and the comedian is aware of effectively how humorous it’s for a complicated Englishman to implicate himself in hip-hop “diss tracks”. His Eton background offers us the present’s funniest gag, too, a few careers honest at his former faculty. A lot of what stays prompts smiles reasonably than stomach laughs, together with his story of filming a video for his save Swindon marketing campaign particularly feeling too many steps faraway from the stage. It’s not a profession finest, however there are flashes on this chromatically themed outing of Graham in superb Technicolor.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, till 24 August
