It’s a feature of standup that comedy watchers, more than adherents of other art forms, can see artists grow up before their eyes. When Ivo Graham first emerged, the only challenge this bashful young comic faced was being unfashionably posh and repressed. With this year’s offering, he’s a grizzled dad, bearded and bruised by relationship breakup. “We’re not at V festival any more, m’boy!”, he reflects ruefully, as life throws him into a diplomatic drinks date with the new partner of his little girl’s mum. Oh, maturity! It’s not always fun, but it’s added a bit of heft, some fruitful battle-scarring, to Graham’s comedy.
If his new show My Future My Clutter doesn’t scale the heights of its award-nominated predecessor, this remains a very effective hour of standup. Part of its pleasure is observing Graham’s greater ease with himself. Of course, self-mortification is still the keynote. Story after story revels in the 32-year-old’s indignity, as he performs a freshers’ week Zoom gig to an audience member busily making risotto, or finds himself cast adrift when he books a 12-berth barge for a 13-man stag do.
Ivo on his own haplessness is a comedy sweet spot – but no longer his only mode. There’s a story here about an acid trip, the humour of which Graham would once have sourced in the awkwardness of someone like him taking drugs in the first place. No longer: the joke here is about the narcotic comedown overlapping with Graham’s (second) trip to Peppa Pig World – on which visit he’d have riffed more, had Boris Johnson not “taken the topic off the table for the rest of the posh twats”.
Time was when Graham was too sheepish, too self-conscious about his own Eton background, to criticise Johnson and co. Tonight, there’s lovely, if lateral, political material, about the government taking time out from a global crisis, say, to declassify go-karting as a sport. But Graham goes harder on himself, mocking the liberal feebleness of his boycott of the malt loaf brand (and Tory donors) Soreen. More at ease with himself, he may be. But fully at ease? Thankfully, never.
At the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
