A former winner of the Sean Lock award for comic originality, Harriet Dyer richly delivers on that promise of oddity in her latest show, Easily Distra … As its title suggests, you can shelve any expectation of coherence or narrative consistency here: it’s 55 minutes of switch-backing reminiscence, as Dyer meanders across the landscape of her peripatetic life. From Cornwall to Birmingham to Bristol, our scatty host moves and moves on, and yet eccentric incident follows her everywhere. The real-world Harriet may justifiably be nonplussed by this (in quite the backhanded compliment, an old school friend tells her she’s not changed at all since she was four years old) – but no doubt it’s a gift to her comedy.
Not that her comedy needs gifts: an increasingly familiar TV face, she’s teetering on the verge of the big time. But here in a cave in Edinburgh, it’s hard to imagine a more marginal figure, a tattooed West Country screwball rummaging her props bag for DIY comedy accoutrements, semaphoring punchlines with a windmilling physicality and oral SFX. Previous fringe shows, including 2022’s acclaimed Trigger Warning, have addressed more significant subject matter, but this one is “a very silly hour indeed”, in her own estimation, as our host fantasises about growing feathers, accidentally sells a single shoe on eBay and memorialises the occasion when a seagull filched her beekeeping brother’s bratwurst.
There’s material that contains within it the germ of several fringe shows, like the routine about her closeted gay dad, or another about her teenage enthusiasm for alcohol. While mental health is not the emphasis here of a performer who openly engages with that subject elsewhere, there are plenty of jokes whose battiness only barely conceals something more troubling – like the one about breaking her own arm to escape a dead-end job. Yikes. But quirky is persistently the top-note in Easily Distra …, and Dyer keeps things upbeat with consistently strong gags (see the one about the roundabout, or the “al dente” variety of traffic accident) and arresting anecdotes. It adds up to nothing more, nor less, than a divertingly dotty autobiographical standup hour.
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At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 30 August
