Luke McQueen has a penchant for grand pranks. He once put on a show claiming that Frankie Boyle would be performing rather than McQueen and another time claimed to have been in a double act with Jack Whitehall. This time round he has hijacked podcaster Stuart Goldsmith. Or has he? Fed up with not being invited onto Goldsmith's Comedian's Comedian podcast McQueen uses AI to create his own interview with Goldsmith live onstage. With hilarious and humiliating consequences.
It's an ingenious conceit, fusing together the validation-hungry side of the stand-up with new fangled technology, which means you don't know what's real and what isn't. One of the many things that keeps you guessing during the show is how complicit Goldsmith is. Maybe he was in on the joke from the start and maybe it's not AI asking the questions. Who can say?
What is certain is that this is a brilliantly inspired show. McQueen, all young Robert De Niro shiny hair and gormless Alan Partridge face, puts in an unforgettable performance, throwing himself into every plot twist and development as if his life, or at least his career, depends on it.
He is more than happy to be the butt of the gag, showing himself and to have been desperate for fame since his youth and usually going about it the wrong way. There's a very old clip of him on Coach Trip trying to entertain the other passengers and instead getting voted off the bus as his jokes do little more than gather tumbleweed. Still, at least he got a free holiday out of it. You don't want to know what he revealed on Embarrassing Bodies, but at least it got him on TV.
He is a classic comic mix of arrogance and pratfall, a pompous twat one minute, merely a twat the next. He thinks he's in control but the AI Goldsmith starts outsmarting him at every turn, forcing McQueen into more desperate acts to justify himself.
It was a surprise that Comedian's Comedian didn't make the shortlist for an Edinburgh Comedy Award. Maybe its a bit too much of an in-joke. You can tell comedy at the Fringe is a bubble when McQueen asks who has heard of Goldsmith's podcast and only a smattering of hands go up. But this doesn't really matter. When he says early on that there have been over 500 episodes and it still hasn't got round to McQueen you get the gist of his standing in the comedy pecking order. By the way, Goldsmith has only released 498 episodes according to his website but I guess "over-500" sounds better for comedy purposes.
I won't reveal too much of what happens as a lot here depends on being unexpected. It's directed by Jordan Brookes and has similarly multi-layered, often self-degrading moments as some of Brookes' best work. Maybe at some point in the future McQueen will say more about what is real and what isn't. Perhaps when he really is interviewed on the Comedian's Comedian podcast.
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Listen to the Comedian's Comedian podcast here.
Picture by Rachel Sherlock
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