Adam Buxton: Kernel Panic

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“A bit puerile,” admits Adam Buxton, as he returns from a pretend commercial break which featured a doctored video of an earnest Brad Pitt singing songs about the wonders of, well, poo. He’s got a point—Buxton, not Brad—and there will definitely be worthier, more fulfilling events at this year’s Fringe. Few shows can make you laugh so hard that you begin to lose control of your own bodily functions, however.

The new title and portentous description (‘Adam Buxton looks within the soul of his laptop and considers how we present ourselves in the net age’) is a tad misleading as this is partly just a retread of his hugely popular BUG events, at London’s BFI and beyond. The spine of the show throughout remains his trawls through YouTube, on the hunt for remarkable pop videos and the often breathtaking comments posted beneath. So consistently amusing are his discoveries—and the array of voices used to convey them—that you happily overlook the fact that this is basically just someone reading stuff off the internet.

That said, a huge amount of work clearly goes into these laptop-based shows. Some of it may lean toward the self-indulgent (a couple of films involving his kids caused murmurs of discontent) and he falls back on some familiar territory here—a remix of the bizarrely addictive Moby/Michael Stipe song—but you cannot help but admire such an unfettered imagination. As a great mock rock band once said, there’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.