Ava Vidal: Remember, Remember the 4th of November

Carving out a niche for oneself as a minority voice in stand-up can't be an easy task. Ava Vidal is one of the scene's very, very few black women and as such there's a whole lot of traditions and assumptions inherent to this generally white, male world that she can't, or doesn't want to, buy into.

It may be inevitable, then, that she has to spend a fair amount of time setting up her jokes so that her mostly white audience get where she's coming from, before she gets to the punchline. The problem with this set is that she does this far too much, either not trusting us to go with her on the more politically edgy material, or simply padding out a set that contains too few gags. It's a shame, because when the jokes do come, they can be very good, playing on her personality and identity in a clever enough way to draw warm laughs of appreciation from most of the punters. But they're preceded and followed up by far too many joke-free lectures: about race in South Africa; about the significance of Obama's presidency; about race, gender and class in stand-up.

In the course of one such passage, she tells us that a critic once annoyed her by saying that working-class comics don't go down well at Edinburgh because they just tell jokes; "you have to learn something" in an Edinburgh set. Ironically, Vidal seems too intent on teaching us to really get us laughing.