Popular Comedian Rob Mulholland

Rob Mulholland begins his first Fringe hour by ranting about whole swathes of standups he reckons have become hugely successful by pretending to be something they’re not. Which is fine if your own stuff then offers a bold alternative; not so much if it chiefly relies on cheap shock tactics to make audiences think you’re “boundary pushing”, as his publicity puts it.

That blurb suggests that this show might be rather interesting, as Mulholland applies for Arts Council funding to stage a play about a comedian tricking the Arts Council. In fact, that’s a fairly short section early on where he apparently, unapologetically, rips them off. The projector dominating the stage throughout is used bafflingly briefly, and the main thrust is actually him and a mate spending that money in seriously seedy ways. But then the whole show leaves a bad taste.

Along the way he jokes about—deep breath—the disabled, diabetics, a dodgy cab driver whose ethnic origin he insists he won’t mention, but then makes acutely obvious, thus drawing much more attention to it than was necessary. There’s a lazy routine in which he makes Angela Merkel sound like a war-film Nazi—as if she’s the big international worry right now—a lengthy impression of someone killing a baby, and a bit where he pretends to have been raped. Fun times.

If Mulholland was some wild misanthrope, this might at least have some intriguing context. But he’s generally a jolly and impressively confident presence, which suggests that it’s all a shameless attempt at onstage infamy. Funny that.