Rosie Jones: I Can’t Tell What She’s Saying – 16:00 at Pleasance Courtyard, Cabaret Bar
This felt like Rosie Jones Unplugged – the version of her from TV, but a little more free to play with ideas, to step out of character. She oscillates wildly from crude to sentimental, from bitingly sarcastic to sincere. Don’t fear if the sincerity or sentimentality get too much; she always undercuts it hard.
It was a bit frustrating to watch this show with some audience members who kept saying patronizing “Aww”s at just about any story, but Rosie Jones toys with those condescending expectations with the expertise of a person who’s been dealing with those for thirty-five years. She also plays with her own abilities, using her slow speech to pace the jokes in unexpected and funny ways. She draws out laughs from the way she moves around, from a gesture but also the struggle to get to that gesture.
This show has some standard TV comedian stuff, like the story about performing for royalty (this one is about the Queen’s Jubilee, rather than a more common Royal Variety Performance story), but it’s mostly a personal show, about her mixed experiences with romance. She puts a lot of time into undercutting the sentimentality of that subject specifically, and it’s consistently funny.
There are solid jokes, there are earnest ruminations on the importance of representation, there are brutal takedowns of her online enemies, and there’s on-brand crass sex-based material. It’s a fun hour.
Grace Jarvis: Getting Dragged Backwards Through a Hedge – 17:50 at Underbelly George Square, The Wee Coo
This is mostly a storytelling show: a love story, a travel story, a story of anxiety that gets its point across with increasingly silly and relatable metaphors. It’s also a story of how autism shapes the way a person grows up, and how we (people in general, but particularly autistic people) retain lessons from childhood long past when they should stop applying.
This is the second hour I’ve seen live from Grace Jarvis (third if you count her YouTube special, which I highly recommend watching); in each one she seems to more clearly define her own niche. I first discovered her on a recommendation from Laura Davis, who directed Jarvis’s show last year, and this year’s show had stronger echoes of Davis, with atmospheric stories about walking alone at night and battling inner turmoil. But it also had elements that felt specific to Jarivs, of reconciling the manic pixie dream girl appearance with decidedly non-manic pixie traits like rigidity and panic.
This show says some interesting things about nuance and outgrowing previously established rules of life. It’s gently funny, and by the end, surprisingly sweet.
Dave Baillie