This isn’t the best night to catch Nev, Glaswegian comedian and co-founder of alternative comedy night CHUNKS. He’s running late, he’s being filmed (and having a lot of trouble with the techs getting it set up), and between Nev, cameramen and flyerer/friend, there’s more people behind the scenes than genuine audience members. Still, once he’s up and running, there’s enough in this off-the-wall anti-stand-up to see Nev is doing something interesting with his comedy, even if Guts is patchy, and tangential, and ultimately quite difficult to get on board with, including by alternative comedy standards.
It’s not what it’s painted to be, either. Publicity assures us that “strong tummies are required” and the flyer photo of a naked Nev covered in bodily fluids suggests something horrific in store. The actual Nev turns out to be smartly dressed in white and, although obviously pissed off and pessimistic, surprisingly pleasant of manner.
Perhaps that’s the Finnieston in him. There’s discussion of this gentrified sector of Glasgow and the hipsters therein. Nev, “lower middle class”, used to be the hipster element of his home borough, but now the humous and holistic therapy brigade have taken over. Place is, in fact, a recurring theme of the show. An opening segment looks at the “happiest places in the world to live”, with Nev providing synopses of each by, for example, repeating their famous inhabitants for comic effect. He doesn’t have something for all of them, and some it is to be hoped he has comebacks prepared for when the audience get pernickerty. “Nothing comes from Finland” is asking for someone to start reeling them off: “Nokia, vodka, Angry Birds…” OK, he may have a point.
The above set-up might sound like so much observational comedy, but that’s never how it comes across. The delivery is way too slow-paced and angular for that. Besides, other sections are more out there. For an extended period, Nev dwells upon a post-prandial bathroom incident after a visit to Edinburgh institution Wings for the super-spicy “suicide challenge”. All bodily fluids end up splayed around the bathroom, and the scenario somehow becomes an odd satirical metaphor.
A key passage repeats descriptions of the mucky bathroom in more and more florid detail (“like nutella in a wound” is one that hits home strongest). It’s a deliberately over-repetitive variations-on-a-theme approach that he uses several times. He uses it again to create Sisyphean tasks for the DWP to give people on workfare. Ideally, it needs a big, in-the-zone audience to ride this rollercoaster of weird riffage. It at least needs a critical mass of the images to be knee-jerk funny. To a near empty room, with not enough of those, it is awkward.
As a result, it is difficult to rate Guts particularly highly, even making allowances for the unfortunate atmosphere this evening. Without prior experience of Nev, it’s way too esoteric. There is some definite playing with the form going on though, which has to be applauded, and you wouldn’t rule out Nev producing something refreshingly different in forthcoming Fringes.