COMEDY

Innit a stupid title? Yes, and that’s about the worst I can say about this show.

For several years before everyone was wandering round with a laptop I developed a habit of sitting in a large throne like chair in the Gilded Balloon’s Library Bar each evening and writing up my notes. One year it wasn’t there and Karen Koren, who runs the venue, came up to me and said “Barry Cryer’s using your chair in his act this year”. I was not sure whether to react to this by feeling I must have become part of the furniture at the Fringe or, as the Gilded Balloon is a university building and I had  a chair there, that was the closest to a professorship I was ever likely to come. Barry Cryer is still using that chair.

He prefers to perform in a small space and for the last couple of years I’ve chosen not to see him so that others can have a chance. This year I decided to indulge myself and I’m glad I did. A majestic magic of mirth from a master.

We are taken on a somewhat unlikely A-Z of comedy ranging from Dave Allen, who Cryer has written for, via Bogart, Euclid, the Falklands War, Pete Postlethwaite, all the way to the Zimmer frame blues. But if you ask me whether Humphrey Lyttelton was H or L I’m sorry I haven’t a clue.

Cryer may now be 76 but he is clearly a long way from a Zimmer frame, and long may it last that way.  Keep that chair Barry, you are making far better use of it than I ever could or would.