Edward Aczel – Lives in a Meaningless Shed

Forty minutes pass before the people grumbling in the row behind decide to quit this sweltering cave. What went through their minds in the interim, as Edward Aczel did his damnest to become a comedic black hole? Sweaty, squinting, doggedly failing to engage the crowd with his signature brand of abysmal non-banter, he ploughs through tedious charts, dull trivia, no-liners, and a slit-your-wrists essay in musical comedy.

"Okay," says Aczel as the grumblers depart. He grimaces. Sweat trickles down his forehead.

"Right."

And everybody falls about laughing.

At this point, it's hard not to feel for the baffled walk-outs, whose only mistake was to be inadequately briefed. They must feel like victims of a cruel hoax, one perpetrated not just by Aczel but by the rest of the audience, by comedy reviewers, by whatever perverse nexus of groupthink and inverted logic came to ordain that a sweaty man being determinedly unfunny for an hour—a whole hour—is funny.

It's not like they failed to get the joke. They just correctly identified the material as crap.

Still, once you've signed up to the Ed Aczel concept, this is a successful set. The laughs dry up somewhat in the middle, but what does it even mean to point that out in the context of an intentionally terrible performance? The closest Aczel comes to breaking the spell is when he inadvertently makes a joke that's merely sub-par, rather than existentially dire – there's a almost passable one about Jimmy Savile, for instance. He needs to be careful.