Fringe review: Slayboy
The Swiss-Scottish comedian combines self-aware stand-up, gentle crowd-work and tightly crafted jokes. ★★★★
Teddy Hall is a Swiss-Scottish comedian and, yes, you don’t get many of those in Adelaide. The premise of his stand-up hour is simple: he’s here to slay somewhere between seven and 1,000 demons and we (particularly the front row) are going to help him out. There’s nothing scary about his crowd-work though. He’s a total gent, even when the punters give him what sound suspiciously like made-up names. There’s a sweetly vulnerable air about Hall. “I want you all to think I’m cool,” he declares and we totally believe him, until he announces he’ll prove this coolness through the medium of… catching food in his mouth. Not a slay.
The demons he wants to slay include people-pleasing, body confidence, making eye contact, and daddy issues, each of which bring with them a cracking set of perfectly timed one-liners. He’s able to laugh at himself as well as our reactions and this leads to a genial set that handles its tight writing and careful structure lightly. What’s particularly interesting about Hall is his ability to talk about his comedy as an artform, and to do so without sounding like a total plonker. That’s because he walks the talk; this is a carefully-crafted routine of intelligent comedy that never looks down on the audience, but also never forgets that we’re there to laugh.
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Slayboy is playing at Upstairs at Duke of York hotel from February 27 – March 15
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