Playing at the Monkey Barrel and streaming live on NextUp Comedy, Milo Edwards starts his stand-up show, Catamaran, with a routine about 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden as a social media pioneer.
It sets the tone for the rest of the show. Edwards’s parents are dead, and people ask him if “he was an accident” born to a much older couple. He remembers the pandemic of 2020 “when British Airways killed Captain Tom”.
This is a comic who uses asides and ‘too soon’ material – and Jeremy Vine, who blocked me on Twitter over an exchange of views about cycles. Edwards is refreshingly British and amusingly self-deprecating.
Smart, funny, and completely at ease with the audience and his material (by the way, do all these young comedians have therapists?), Edwards is both Hackney and Essex and a proper bloke.
Catamaran picks out moments from his parents’ letters, found last year, on the grounds “you can’t embarrass the dead” by sharing their horny thoughts. Or indeed the thoughts James Joyce had for his wife.
It’s notable that Edwards calls his parents very old when they were born in the 1940s. It made me stop and think about generations and mortality in a very different way.
Edwards’s comedy also heads into how we plan to be remembered, and how some people are quickly lost to history. The bawdy letters of the Edwards seniors head us into planes, crumbles, chemists and politics.
The Catamaran of the title is literal, belonging to one Jim Locke in the 1980s. The days you could buy a London house for £20k. The days the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher, and failed. And the days one man could set sail on a catamaran.
It’s a slightly snarky set that is as open about velcro shoes as it is about the ability to win Taskmaster. And, of course, what’s been happening with the American government and the inevitable Trump impersonation.
4 stars.
Milo Edwards: Catamaran is at Edinburgh Fringe until 30 Aug.