Well, is it?
Here’s the premise: a man eats a lot of food. More specifically: he eats the same foodstuff, a whole kilogram of it, repeatedly, not so much ad nauseam as ad nausea. Revealing which foodstuff he’s consuming threatens to reveal one of the show’s few genuine jokes, but then jokes are beside the point. Is This Enough is comedy without form, or form without comedy, or both, or neither; it’s postmodern, like an Umberto Eco novel, and slavishly masochistic, like reading an Umberto Eco novel. Or an enema.
Is it funny? Yes. It is inexplicably, confoundingly funny, a doleful man in a silly costume eating in a rapt room full of cidered-up students who are also laughing but do not understand quite why. For this slice of god-knows-why, the Banshee Labyrinth is the perfect place. Just as the cage-doored crypt was the ideal venue for the half-Fringe Serial Killer Cabaret’s leather-studded magnificence, the cinema room sets up Quinn’s conceit perfectly. An auditorium of plush seats, a proper black stage framed by theatrical velvet curtains, threatens to elevate the art: but this could not be more wrong. Here, in the backroom of one of Edinburgh’s most consciously dingy and eldritch pubs, stowed in the catacombs between Cowgate and Hive, real horrors of the soul are lurking. You will start to sweat, pangs of hunger may stir (they stock Babybels and Peperami at the bar). You may need liquid refreshment, in which case you can very happily vacate the show and wander back in five minutes. Mark Dean Quinn is not going to stand on ceremony. He is full of depressive purpose.
Quinn is an avuncular presence, if the uncle in question is the weird, sad bloke you’d find standing in the corner at a wedding, necking Baileys from the bottle and trying to show you pictures of his dead dog. He has the look of an amiable olden-days taverner, and the manner of a sullen minor-party candidate who’s just failed to be elected MP for Dartford, and neither of these are negatives. In the hands of a less able performer, this show would be just be masochism for its own sake, the strange kid eating worms in the playground. But Quinn deserves credit for taking his schtick and making it stick. This isn’t some James Corden stunt of ill-advised self-aggrandising show-off; instead it feels masochistic, and dirty and wrong, and you’re complicit in it. You could leave at any time, but you don’t want to. It feels a bit sadistic to watch this. Why can’t we look away? Is it because of the background music, which Quinn found on YouTube and which promises to ‘heal your DNA’?
Personally, I’m not convinced.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Is This Enough isn’t a show for the culture vultures. It’s at nearly 2am in a cult Edinburgh pub. Quinn has spoken about the appeal of his audiences, who are largely locals on a night out, or overworked Fringe employees finally cutting loose after hard days. His crowds tend to be beered up and gobby, lobbing wisecracks at their performer. For many other comics, it’d be a challenge. Quinn is more than up to it, though, and he keeps them all on side, amusedly chastising audience members for discussing Stewart Lee and Bridget Christie’s separation – not for interrupting his art, but because it is, quite frankly, too close to being a proper conversation, a doomed gesture at sanity. At a previous performance, the show’s ‘climax’ resulted in hullabaloo so loud that the pub’s bouncers intervened. Tonight, when Quinn briefly breaks his persona to warmly greet a couple of returning regulars, it’s a reminder that, much like how Moe’s Tavern in The Simpsons has its own cast of recurring, wordless barflies, Is This Enough also has regulars, for whom it is clearly not quite enough. They are coming back for more. God bless them.
At the end, you don’t know how to feel. The show ends in triumph, a sort of collective moment of victory, a gleeful trashing of the façade that underpins so much comedy (down to the obligatory emotional hook to tie everything together). But that dies away in flames. You end up feeling like the audience should gang together and stage an intervention. What do we make of it? Personally, this Fringe has seemed like a deluge of unfunny corporate comics straight off the BBC. But if we’re to keep up the pretence that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is really all that it claims to be, then something here has to be worth five stars. This is the funniest thing this reviewer has seen, and, I feel, the best we’re getting. F*** it.
Image provided to The Student by Sam Stevens