Lach: the day I went insane

“It’s the little things,” says Lach, strumming his guitar thoughtfully. “It’s the little things that count.” Lach builds his entire show on these little things, from pot-fulled adolescent antics to the regular trips he makes to visit his mother. 

His songs and anecdotes are charming, but as the show wears on the laughs become less and less frequent. This may partly be due to his frame of reference: accounts of New York and Chicago are bogged down in geographical detail, and are somewhat lost on an Edinburgh crowd. He acknowledges that a song based on his love for Kiss has gone over the heads of much of his audience, and offers to sing it again “with footnotes”. “Noooo,” wails a man at the back, whether or not in jest it is hard to say. The show never seems to be going anywhere, with digressions so rambling you forget what prompted them in the first place. As a result, the set certainly feels longer than an hour.

Nevertheless, Lach has a strong stage presence and a confident, relaxed attitude which carries much of his act. His songs, such as ‘Drinking Beers with Mom’, are polished and well delivered, and so his admission, “I’ve been a songwriter my whole life, so I’m getting advice from comedians,” is unsurprising. More of his witty, self-aware songs would have livened up the act – one can only hope that his suggestion for a musical, ‘West Bank Story’, would contain more singing than dialogue.