“This has been a weird show,” Christopher Macarthur-Boyd admits near the end of the evening. Which is simply stating the facts. He’s had a woman talking constantly to those around her for half the evening, despite being constantly shushed by the rest of the audience, he missed a chunk of material about nature documentaries and David Attenborough (the main reason, maybe the only reason, he suggests, to be proud to be British) near the start of the show and had to shoehorn it into the middle, halfway through another section in order to make the climax of that other section make sense, and he, tells us, that there is a whole other bit about his ADHD that he’s had to ditch (but not to worry because that was “the shiteiest” part of the show).
But if anything it’s a mark of just how good a comedian he is these days that he takes all of this and runs with it, making a busy Monkey Barrel laugh for an hour without let-up. And it’s fun to watch the Glasgow comedian climb out of the holes he (and others) have dug.
But ultimately, hiccoughs aside, this evening showcases all of Macarthur-Boyd’s comedic strengths over and above his quick wit. He has a marvellously mobile face and a quiff that he uses as an exclamation point. There is a clear love for and facility with language, a willingness to reveal his true self (to comic ends), and, bottom line, he takes great pleasure in constructing a good joke.
Howling at the Moon – on the evening I saw it at any rate – finds humour in video games, the fact that Australian women are attracted to “specky, wee Scottish guys”, the Komodo dragon, Ozempic, racism and bisexuality. And even on an evening where things are slightly chaotic all of it is funny and sharp and beautifully performed. Weird is not necessarily a pejorative.
Christopher Macarthur-Boyd: Howling at the Moon, 21.00 Monkey Barrel 1, until August 24
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/christopher-macarthur-boyd-howling-at-the-moon
