The secret of comedy, they say, is timing – and Go Faster Stripe’s Chris Evans is fretting his is wrong. Not being a football fan, he booked a full afternoon and evening of standup recordings for the day of the World Cup final. But he needn’t have worried, as there’s a full house at Cardiff’s Canopi for the first of two shows by Alice Fraser, with tickets for each costing less than the price of a pint.
The Australian comic begins with A Passion For Passion, about her longstanding and ongoing love affair with romantic fiction, and how she came to write a book about it. Dressed up in a bold red ballgown like the archetypal heroine of a bodice-ripper, she is under no illusions about the genre’s much-derided cliches and silliness, recalling how the preposterous back-cover blurbs of Mills & Boon novels were a bounteous source of childhood mirth and talking about her own fictional creation, the author D’Ancey LaGuarde.
But romance novels have seen her through difficult times, and she skewers snobbery and baulks at the idea that books that bring such joy to so many millions of readers should be routinely seen as no more than “guilty pleasures”. A large part of the problem is that that readership is almost exclusively female – if more men read romantic fiction, she argues, they might have a better grasp of what women actually want.
Over the course of a punchy, well-structured hour during which she never forgets to leaven the lesson with humour, Fraser also ruminates on comedy itself, using the human centipede metaphor to describe the unhealthy relationship between right-wing politicians, mainstream news media and political satirists, and poking fun at improv on the grounds that those on stage are always enjoying themselves more than those in the audience.
Fraser’s second show, Oh Man!, dovetails neatly. The central conceit – that she is attempting to teach a sentient Roomba how to be a man – is cover for musings on masculinity and a takedown of the bullshit ideals and toxic ideologies that circulate in the murky depths of the manosphere. We shouldn’t allow the loudest voices to dictate definitions, she insists; a real man nurtures and nourishes those closest to him.
The latter show is a work in progress, and somewhat patchy, as Fraser admits at the end. Some lines are garbled, and there are too many laugh-free lulls and awkward pauses. But there are also enough moments – in the hilarious routine about penis quality over penis length, for instance, or the Stewart Lee-like section in which she uses graphs to trace the trajectory of the show – to suggest that, with some tightening of bolts and trimming of fat (plus the aid of a projector screen for the slideshow), Oh Man! could be on a par with its more polished predecessor.
Alice Fraser: A Passion For Passion / Oh Man!, Canopi, Cardiff, Sun 19 July
words BEN WOOLHEAD
