Rich Hardisty @ The Stand, Edinburgh

Rich Hardisty has lived a life: addled with addiction and a shedload of mental health issues, it’s remarkable he’s here today. Silly Boy charts the times someone’s looked at him with deep sympathy, shaken their head and said “you’ve been a silly boy”. It certainly infantilises Hardisty’s many struggles, but at least reassures you that he’s surrounded by decent people.

The shame then, is that Silly Boy isn’t very silly at all. Skirting within a whisker of trauma porn, there’s little levity to detract from the awful things Hardisty has experienced. He wears his trauma lightly enough whilst detailing his scrapes and conjures up some funny imagery (Bart Simpson pants, his brother’s unlikely job), but it never feels quite enough to redress the balance between light and dark, even with a deluge of pop culture references. His anecdotes are presented like outrageous pub stories, but without the workshopping, hyperbole or comedic structure which would make them all the more captivating. There’s an unshakeable feeling of unease that these tales are completely verbatim, without the required distancing between the real and the exaggerated.

Where Hardisty excels is in his physicality. The few glimpses of it we get – a mime opening a window, dancing like nobody’s watching – are a real gear shift towards something naturally funnier. However, the hour’s climax feels physically laboured, focusing too hard on movement as opposed to being amusing. While his physical display of mania is noble in its rawness, its execution is garbled and fizzles out to confused applause (despite the palpable sympathy in the room).

Hardisty cuts an interesting shape, and clearly has plenty of anecdotes worthy of stage time (at one point he mentions finding his estranged father knowing only his name, which feels tailor-made for a comedy hour), but Silly Boy is lacking in the refinement and cohesive structure a show like this needs. The hour remains underdeveloped, even after a full Fringe run. The result is a show which, while well-intentioned, feels exploitative of Rich Hardisty’s vulnerabilities.

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Reviewed on 19 April 2023, at The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh
Rich Hardisty: Silly Boy, touring until 21 May