Carey Marx: The Doom Gloom Boom at Fringe Fest Review

Carey Marx is the dark heart of the ‘Stand Pack’, that band of Fringe comedians whose names have become synonymous with Edinburgh’s only permanent comedy venue. Marx is a proper club comedian, edgy, dark and a little dangerous; and his 2009 offering, The Doom Gloom Boom, is a convoluted half-apology, half-assault on our current obsession with doom-mongering.

Marx has a real knack for setting an audience on edge without being repugnant - something of a gift given how close much of his material cuts to the bone. His ability to offset a joke about, say, the death of conjoined twin babies on Christmas day, by merely putting on a “What? Me, miss?” schoolboy expression is almost absurd.

The first act of the set is based around a conversation which takes place some 40,000 feet in the sky (on a plane, I should point out, Marx is no surrealist) between him, an airheaded woman and a Geordie misogynist. Through this, he explores topics as diverse as global warming and Northerners’ hygiene standards. He then travels some 100 years into the future to a dystopia in which health and safety legislation reigns supreme: a relatively pedestrian topic rendered surprisingly fresh by some excellent writing.

What lets this set down is not the strength of Marx’s jokes. Rather, there is no real sense of flow or variety and the set can feel unaffecting as a result. Marx’s staccato delivery, though impactful in small bursts, is tiring when spread across an hour and ultimately he's hard work to truly engage with.