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Underbelly, Bristo Square – Buttercup
This hour long comedy show by YouTuber Max Fosh is a funny, chatty, easygoing gig with brilliant original material and use of digital media.Summary
Rating
Excellent
Max Fosh is a prominent YouTuber, with 1.34 million subscribers. As a fan of his series Streetsmart, where he interviews university students on nights out, I was intrigued to see how his charm and humour would translate to a stand up gig. Luckily, it adapted well. Maybe they taught it as another language at Harrow which is where Max, a self-proclaimed ‘posh’ person, attended school.
Starting his show with a hands up quiz to identify fellow ‘posh’ people, Max quickly puts the audience at ease, establishing that he knows exactly who he is and is willing to mock himself. Once he has found the “Aga-cooking, Waitrose-shopping, French Alps-skiing” audience members he perfectly and relentlessly uses his own experiences to laugh at these stereotypes and the fact they happen to be true.
Max’s audience work is stellar, and his ability to be genuinely funny without preparation is demonstrated further as he takes attendees’ phones and peruses through their notes app, which was truly a hilarious insight into their lives. Never have I so quickly gone through and ensured all my embarrassing notes were deleted. Max Fosh; making you laugh and do life admin at the same time!
Fosh consistently intersperses his jokes with helpful context from his YouTube channel. Whilst this alone provides a funny and unique style of humour, his non-YouTube stand up material is so good it would be brilliant even without the digital content, especially for those that are already fans and have seen most of his YouTube work. Particularly good is the segment where he seeks to find the UK’s youngest person called Gary, thus beginning a hilarious 15 minutes exploring the plethora of baby names given in the UK last year and eventually finding the youngest with that name. This is followed by an in-depth ceremony and signing of documents, legally changing an audience member’s name to Gary.
Combined with the stickers Fosh presents to each audience member as we leave, he really articulates and delivers a beautiful set of unique material. Overall, we’re offered a hilarious show with a relaxed style that engages with the audience, and I particularly enjoyed his ability to tell really cool and interesting facts using humour.
Written by: Max Fosh
Max Fosh: Zocial Butterfly plays at EdFringe 2022 until 29 August. Further information and bookings here.
