Edward Aczel: Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

As you read this, Edinburgh’s basements are infested with performers baring their souls, hammering nails into their faces, savagely mocking the recently, tragically dead – all for the sake of a gasp, a guilty laugh and a tenner on the door. Edward Aczel, armed with a flip chart and a passion for SWOT analysis, is braver than the lot of them.

If you’ll excuse the image, Aczel’s sensible slacks must harbour a monstrous set of balls, considering the unflinching commitment with which he drones his way through this soporific yet strangely compelling display of anti-comedy. He begins on an apologetic note, lowering our expectations before ‘a comedy show designed to be moderately amusing’. What follows is a presentation on the various directions Aczel’s life might have taken – each expressed through the medium of bullet points and graphs. With a permanent wince and a voice made to read small print, he knowingly dices with his crowd’s attention span as the set wears on.

The craft needed to build a full-length show with virtually no conventional gags is certainly the most impressive aspect of Aczel’s act, maintaining as it does such a paradoxically high level of quality. Watching Aczel’s studiedly half-arsed impersonation of Northern comedy’s nostalgia or improv’s empty zaniness, it’s clear that this is a man who knows his art inside out and has carved himself the perfect niche on comedy's fringes. He labours the juxtaposition of his miserable wonk persona with professed—but unfulfilled—themes of nihilism and apocalypse, but when a simple sneer can raise a laugh, his character alone more than carries the show.