Well. Here we are again. Mark Silcox. The act who is solely responsible for the existence of The Wee Review’s 0-star “unreviewable” rating. He is, to say the very least, not for everyone. He is our white whale, our albatross, our third literary sea-faring metaphor. If The Wee Review were organised enough to actually have interns, we would almost certainly send them to review Silcox as a hazing ritual. One thing we can say for certain: you will not see anything at this or any other Fringe that is quite like a Mark Silcox show.
This year’s show purports to be a discussion of women, society’s treatment of women, and the highly scientific reasoning behind it. Does Silcox give anything more than the most cursory mention of women during the entire show? Of course not. Does he make any use at all of the microphone available to him on stage? Of course not. Does he ever deliver on any of the promises he makes in aggressive Comic Sans at the start of the show? Of course not.
Oh yes. Comic Sans. Dr Silcox is a successful celebrity comedian now, the inexplicable darling of the alternative circuit, making an appearance in every show you love like a moustachioed Kevin Eldon. Not for him, the 80’s acetate overheads or poorly-printed handouts of previous shows. This year, Silcox has a projector and a slide deck. The projector, of course, is the very cheapest of Ali Express tat and provides all the illuminating power of a tealight in a swimming pool, but that’s enough for Silcox’s extensive powerpointery to show itself against the unironed white teatowel that’s hung at the back of the stage.
If the idea of comedy from PowerPoint slides gives you the fear, then strap in because Silcox has well over a hundred of them, and by god, he’s going to spend time on every single one. Some of them are funny. Some of them are baffling. Some of them are lifted straight from a GCSE biology textbook and still make as much sense within the context of the show as anything else. It’s a confusing and meandering miscellany, delivered with a kind of furious monotony that is as impressive in its dedication as it is off-putting in its drudgery. He’s your favourite science teacher. You won’t learn anything, but he lets you play Candy Crush during lessons, and at the end of term, you can bet he’s going to do something inadvisable with magnesium.
All of this, though, is just set dressing. It’s misdirection. It’s gaudy ephemera hiding an uncomfortable and unavoidable truth: there is a chance that Mark Silcox is an actual genius. He’s probably not – he’s almost definitely not – but one can’t entirely dismiss the possibility that this is a glorious Kaufmanesque long con, a staring contest between the audience and a man with an almost unprecedented commitment to character and conceit. It’s fascinating. Silcox is brilliant. Silcox is terrible. Silcox is the self-aware pinnacle of magnificent anti-comedy. Silcox is a well-meaning, bumbling incompetent. And this is the real greatness here: somehow, he is both. He is simultaneously magnificent and dreadful, and the act of observation fails to collapse the comedic wave function. Silcox manages to exist in a super-position. He is both a wave and a particle. Women Only is everything that is awful about comedy at the Fringe, and it is also the pure distillation of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at its most comedically superb. He is zero stars, and he is all the stars. It looks like we need yet another new rating of “Schrodinger’s Comedian”, at once alive and also dead. And unless Silcox chooses to open the metaphorical box, we’ll never know for sure. For now, let’s just give him three and call it done.
‘Mark Silcox: Women Only‘ runs until Aug 27, 2023, at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms at 13.40