Tom Cashman has a persona that’s hard to pin down. Sometimes he relies too hard on mainstream tropes and seems like he’d make a great club comedian, but he also centres his stand-up hours around PowerPoint presentations, and NPC is no exception. His PowerPoint slides are odes to pedantry, finding weird little details and picking them apart to hilariously minute elements. He’s the nerd’s jock and the jock’s nerd, slipping awkwardly between both roles, depending what story he’s telling.
NPC features much of Tom Cashman’s usual fare – slides with clever wordplay, stories about taking silly arguments to ridiculous extremes, turning conventional wisdom on its head. However, he ends on a story so wild that, assuming its true (and he does have photographic evidence to back it up), it’s amazing he’s made it this far into his career without getting that one out.
This is a story that could turn his silly stand-up show into a more serious ending, but he doesn’t go that way, assuring the audience that he’s fine and is sharing this for the jokes, not the emotional weight. Cashman’s stand-up in general is heavy on jokes and light on emotional weight, which is borderline unusual in Edinburgh but it’s a cracking comedy hour.
A few of the jokes I recognized from his previous shows, but he had enough new material to make this worth seeing even for longtime fans, and his delivery is enough fun to be worth seeing again.
There is a running joke of picking on audience member that at times I found uncomfortably cruel, but it was arguably justified in that he picked his victim according to which audience member had chosen to insult him via a form from a QR code on the way in. So if you don’t want Tom Cashman to call you horrible names throughout his hour, don’t be mean to him on the QR code, and you’ll be fine.