Some people like to judge their comedy shows by how quickly the hour passes.  If you want to look at your phone, watch or carriage clock too soon, the person on the stage may be in trouble.

Ed Night’s show flies by in a moment.  I can hardly believe it’s time to leave the Monkey Barrel – and I understand the comedy fans I met in a bar the other night who say they plan to go and see him twice, or maybe even three times this Fringe.

 

After suffering a broken foot just before the start of August, Night is performing in a moon boot and on crutches. This unexpected physical frailty has given him a new awareness of the passing of time, on ageing and of the fragility of human life.

 

His writing and his joke writing are absolutely beautiful.  He has, he says, an unusually high gag rate per minute, and it’s true. But there’s also so much love and poetry in the way he talks about the everyday things. If Dylan Thomas was a comic from South London, he might sound something like this.

 

Night has often been praised for speaking up for his generation and there is plenty of deep intelligent reflection about the current state of the world. He is full of nostalgia, quietly envious of the blessings and security enjoyed by people in the past and open about his own precarious mental health.

 

Even comedy is not much consolation, he says.  He’s been trying to talk about depression, bisexuality and political instability for years, he says, and he still hasn’t found a way to get his thoughts across. He’s not sure anything is working any more.

 

If it all sounds a bit downbeat it isn’t.  Night reassures his audience, like the pro he is.  He even sings his own intro music.  Most people don’t even notice him lurking alongside the sound desk serenading his audience in sonorous tones as we walk into the room.

 

We are in safe showbiz hands and the room fills with rolling laughter as one perfectly honed phrase and dazzling bit of wordplay follows another.  Night’s rhythm and his voice become hypnotic – and stay with you as you walk out onto Blair Street and into the rainy Fringe evening.

 

I’m also very glad someone is finally making a stand on behalf of the Australian Ibis.  Those poor birds have suffered enough.