Rome and Away: Eddie is ’ard.
Rome and Away with Michael Monkhouse.
Madcap anarchist, biting social satirist, fearless audience-baiter…
Edward Aczel is none of these things. He is however one of the most distinctive, understated and under-rated acts currently working the circuit.
Mind you, as you settle down with the obligatory pint for tonight’s stint at Cocktail Comedy Club, you can’t help feeling it’s gonna be a bit of an uphill journey. Last time around we got the mighty Diane Spencer, who herself got a full-scale warm-up act and a fuller-scale packed house to boot. Edward, meanwhile, has to settle for about three billiseconds of intro from an organiser – not a comedian herself, not trying to be one either – and about as many spectators as Berlusconi has friends on Facebook… Yet paradoxically, it creates the kind of downbeat, Dee-esque environment that’s just right for this guy’s dark, ironic style of comedy.
He wanders onstage as if by accident and then kicks off by muttering some fascinating, historically valid but completely irrelevant anecdotes: ‘Nothing to do with the show, just show how the mind wanders when you’re nervous…’ And over the next forty minutes or so he treats us to the vicissitudes of existence – and in a brave move, that means his existence, not ours. And so he meanders his leisurely path through his career choices (or lack thereof), search for religious comfort (or impossibility thereof), attempts for political engagement (or – that’s right – futility thereof). There are some mock visual aids too as he asks the organiser back up ‘for additional glamour, edification and good humour’. There are also endless post-modernist deconstructionalist editorial observations about ‘how this would be funnier if I were now to do something else, which I won’t’.
Fortunately, there are plenty of laughs along the way too. It all climaxes in a run-down of classic comedy strategies (perilous puns, enticing incongruities, manic Michael Caine impressions) and a challenge to the audience to get him to try them, ‘if you can remember any’. But ‘challenge’ is the wrong word, this is more like banter with your long-lost uncle down the pub, and that’s surely the point.
Skit round the Net for comments on Eddie and you’ll find the majority more bemused than amused: ‘Don’t get it’… ‘A bit marmite’ (I’m sorry?)… ‘He actually gives a running count down of how many more minutes you still have to sit through it’… But that’s their fault not his, simply because he’s so far from the trad stand-up we’ve wrongly come to consider ground-breaking. To appreciate Aczel you have to get into his world, see things from his bizarre perspective, love and hate life in equal measures just as he does.
So yeah, Edward Aczel’s a tough nut to crack. But yeah, it’s worth it and then some.
And yeah, I can’t wait to see him again.
