I have no reason for not blogging recently other than laziness. Let’s see if we can change that tomorrow and do a nice catch-up blog of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. For now though, I have a review of the show I’ve just been to see tonight as I know some of you like that sort of stuff.

So Edinburgh Fringe is nearly upon us and all the comedians are running around the country like headless chickens doing various preview nights to try and shape the show they’re going to be performing there. Tonight, for the first time, I saw such a show. Consequently I’ll be saying as little as possible about the actual content unless I feel it’s one of those things that definitely won’t be included in the final thing. Spoilers and that, innit?

I headed out to Darlington to go see two comics, whose shows were both nominated for if.com awards (they’ll always be Perriers to me though) last year and whose acts I also love.

It’s safe to say that both shows were far from perfect but in completely different ways, largely down to the preference of the comedian I suspect, but on the other hand there were moments of brilliance in each of them.

First up was Andrew Lawrence, who I fell in love with last year with his show ‘Social Leprosy For Beginners And Improvers’. Tonight I fell in love with his dark sense of humour once again but only after a while.

He spent the first five minutes of his act explaining how it was a preview for his Edinburgh show and then after that he had a very slow start. Still, once he got going he was brilliant, with some great anecdotes, good accents and characters and well thought out callbacks too.

With time I imagine it’ll blossom (probably not a word best used in conjunction with Andrew’s dark style of comedy) into an all-round excellent show but for now including the slow start and spiel about how it was a preview it’s currently about ten minutes short of the hour it should be. Still, that just means when I go see the full thing that there’ll be a new joke or two for me laugh at to make up that time.

Jon Richardson was the second act on and I think his set can only be described as delightfully ramshackle. He clearly had a different approach to his previews due to his OCD as he’d brought a book with him and at first I feared it was for him to read his jokes from but no, it was for him to make notes in. Apparently the black was to write the about good bits and his red pen was his angry pen to write about the bits that went wrong. He also made light that he’d thought about using a purple one for ad-libs and a green one to draw willies. For me though, green and willies don’t go together.

Like Andrew, Jon had a bit of spiel before he launched into his show but the difference is that Jon had the audience giggling from the off despite the fact he was just talking about how he was wanting a McDonalds on the way to the show but had to settle for a Burger King instead as he couldn’t find one.

Overall, Jon was consistently funny throughout his set, having me bent double with laughter at times, and getting the occasional rounds of applause too. I felt the stuff for his Edinburgh show was also lacking in order to make it up to the 60 minutes but I also felt that he was more restricted by the time of the night’s set rather than the lack of material (in other words, he had the material but not the time to perform it).

After seeing these two comics I feel that tonight will not impair my enjoyment of their full shows and also that both shows will be amazing, seeing as they both have four weeks to give them a good spit and polish (though maybe not the spit for Jon as it’s a bit unhygienic).