Ivo Graham: Bow Ties and Johnnies

Is comedy a rich man's game? You'd be forgiven for thinking so as you traipse across the city this month. Well-off Oxbridge alumni crop up everwhere throughout the Fringe, while performers without wealthy relatives or the backing of big agencies presumably have some nefarious method in mind for paying their inevitable debt. In this environment, Ivo Graham really needn’t spend the entirety of his show apologising for having been schooled at Eton, and yet he pushes ahead with this searingly honest exercise in self-flagellation regardless.

At times, he calls to mind a figure in the mould of Woody Allen, an emotionless automaton, wired to inflict perfectly crafted barbs upon himself. He demonstrates a clear understanding of the human condition, but little ability to identify with it in any meaningful way. The 22 year old expertly exploits the stigma of having lost his virginity later than most of his peers, without ever conveying how this supposed social failure made him feel. He explores his outsider status not to move us, but because he recognises the comic value of his own isolation and pain. A member of “an outdated, hereditory elite,” it's to Graham's credit that he can sell himself as a low status figure of fun whose privileged upbringing we never once come close to resenting. He's just too smart and self-aware to be anything other than a hilarious embarrassment of a man, albeit one who seems increasingly comfortable in his own skin.