Fin Taylor only has one joke, he explains, and he gets it out of the way early on. This is a lie of course, as the following hour is packed with enough gags, observations and bizarre outbursts to have the audience rolling in the aisles. The show is held together by a rough theme of Taylor's incompetence, childishness, and hatred of his friends - a thread that allows him to jump from topics such as vegetarianism and alcohol to his inability to read books. Utilising sound and lighting cues, Taylor is able to bring the audience into his own world, and fully share the pain of the terminally inept.
His is the mark of a true comic, the outsider stuck on the inside with no means of escape.
Surprisingly this is Fin Taylor's debut hour at the fringe, and yet it feels far more polished and structured than many other newcomers’ shows. For the most part, the material feels tried and tested, there is not a duff joke in sight. The size of the tiny venue lends itself to his style too, the proximity allowing the whole audience to see his varied facial expressions - from lip-curling sarcasm to unhinged enthusiasm.
The show is called Real Talk, and there is a brutal honesty that runs throughout, with Taylor admitting many things about his personal life that many comics would shy away from. It is an unashamed celebration of the lowbrow, with a fine selection of smutty jokes - enhanced by Taylor's semi-apologetic self-deprecation - and a torrent of incredulous rage at his holier-than-thou former friends. He embraces the mind-numbing qualities of vices such as alcohol and social media, championing their necessity in a world that he is just not built for.
It is his social awkwardness that most can relate to, from his fear of making racially-insensitive faux pas to his fist-biting embarrassment at meeting the subject of his masturbatory fantasies. His is the mark of a true comic, the outsider stuck on the inside with no means of escape.
