A fun hour, and probably some of the better stand-up you’ll see at this year’s Fringe.
As a comedian, Rory is quite funny and engaging. (I’ll bet he’d also do a bang-on Matt Smith impression, through sheer appearance alone, but that’s beside the point.) In his show, his material is consistently good, and he does a fine job of incorporating lights and PowerPoint -- to hilarious effect. He also does a really good job incorporating the audience, as well as engaging with hecklers.
There are few moments during Monoglot where the jokes Rory tells are ‘weak’, but there are quite a few moments where the humour is a bit more tame than what you might expect at Fringe. Don’t get me wrong: Rory is a smart, sensible comic. At times, however, I just wish that he’d brought the audience out of their comfort zone a little and relied less on silly gags.
Overall, Rory’s is very funny, in spite of what some might consider to be pretty dull subject matter (linguistics and languages). To his credit, he manages to wrench more humour out of these perhaps ‘dull’ topics than a lot of comics do out of far more outrageous premises, and this is an impressive feat. In this show, he takes the audience places that are a bit more plain than most other comics might -- but he is just as funny. This afternoon’s audience seemed to enjoy most of Rory’s set. A fun hour, and probably some of the better stand-up you’ll see at this year’s Fringe.
