Steve Pretty's Perfect Mixtape

Early in his cassette-based comedy set, Steve Pretty references that rather awkward moment in a mixtape where you have to change sides mid-melody. Unfortunately many of Pretty’s own jokes seem to have this painful disjunct built into them. His mix of backwards whimsy and trivia may occasionally strike the occasional sweet note, but it mostly falls just the wrong side of endearing and lands on plain odd.

Reminiscent of a less-jaded Howard Moon, nerdy Norwegian jazz aficionado Pretty spools material for his second solo Fringe show around a homemade cassette of esoteric world music. He's unmoved by the “Bluetooth-enabled snoods” on which neophiles play their music today. Props to Pretty for making what might be the first "snood" gag at the Fringe, but this show is more spectacle than comedy set.

Perfect Mixtape’s most memorable moments come when Pretty loosens up his bemused audience by handing them mini kazoos and freestyling from his suitcase of scrap instruments. He live-loops teapot trumpets and scrapes together old computer circuit boards for percussion. The motley music, though, is the only genuinely exciting part of the show. 

Perfect Mixtape somehow contrives to be both conspicuously scripted and underwritten. Pretty hasn’t quite mastered the illusion of spontaneity in his delivery yet. And his promising finale, a revelation that he once attended his own wake when the Daily Mail prematurely implied he had died in the 2005 tsunami, is rather squandered with a quip about the respectable turnout.