Writer: Will Duggan
Will Duggan is not a household name. If he was, he wouldn’t be able to do a show about his failure to live up to his early potential. Instead, acknowledging that most of his audience will only be there because they had a spare hour to fill before Ivo Graham comes on, he makes a lot out of never really making it to the top in one of the few professions where you can be deemed unsuccessful if you aren’t in the top 1% of people who enter it.
Duggan is the ideal warm-up man, amusing enough to be entertaining and worth seeing but never likely to upstage the main act. His opening chat offers up a good seam of self-deprecation mixed with observations about how easy and enjoyable various unpleasant people find it to be, and how neither he nor us are living in our best world if we are all in an underground room in Edinburgh in the middle of the afternoon.
More observational stuff about liars works well, even if the reference points are somewhat dated, but a lengthy routine around primary colours goes down a comedy cul-de-sac redeemed more through problems with the lighting than the strength of the material, before he really starts to focus on the topic of the show.
There are some great moments when he compares how the same words said about his 22 year old self now take on different meaning 15 years later, and when he talks about the casual attitude his dad and others in his generation have to death, but there is also a drift into obvious basic comedy tropes when he talks about becoming a father and links this back into his theme for much of the rest of the set.
It stays safe, gently amusing but seldom laugh-out-loud, sometimes straying outside topics of polite conversation but never making people think ‘did he really say that?’ There’s a sense that Duggan probably has lived up to his potential as a stand-up. It’s solid and reliable, worth going to see in the middle of an afternoon, even if his show is never likely to be one of the choices on offer in the evening at the fringe.
Runs until 25 August (not 13th) | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Safe afternoon stand-up
