Rob Auton has returned to the Edinburgh Fringe with CAN: The Story of a Man Called Can, the life-affirming tale of a motivational speaker on a downward spiral. Auton does not perform as himself, but as the titular character, Can, in a departure from his 2024 performance of The Eyes Open and Shut Show.
Can’s career as a motivational speaker begins with ordering a kettlebell on Amazon, in an attempt to help his postman become more active. Can ruminates on how the simple action of ordering the kettlebell will cause every individual responsible for its delivery to become a little more physically active. Subsequently, the postman becomes a strongman, and later, the President of Algeria. The character of the postman demonstrates how, in the world of CAN, small, and often absurd, acts of kindness have the power to transform reality. Though the story Auton tells is grand in scope, at times I wished he would zoom in a little closer, because his observational jokes about human nature were the funniest parts of the show.
In one such moment of observational comedy, Auton recounts a Reddit thread he saw, in which a man confessed to getting an “involuntary semi-on” at the sight of his neighbour’s cat. The responses of other “Redditors” are presented as a perverse display of human connection, illustrating the fine line between discomfort and optimism that Auton walks so cleverly throughout the show. Finding hope and wonder in the mundane may not sound very funny, but the spot-on description of “seeing your bus approach like a lowkey lottery ticket” definitely resonated with Auton’s audience.
Auton also does an excellent job of satirising tropes of motivational speaking, addressing his audience with such thought-provoking statements as, “If you were just five metres that way, well… you wouldn’t be in this room.” A particularly funny section of the show uses Can’s stint as a speaker in a primary school to illustrate how discomfiting it would be if children really absorbed half of what is thrown at them in assemblies, and began quoting Voltaire at home.
I also have to mention Auton’s frankly insane impression of Taylor Swift, whom he has given the persona of a cowboy mobster, and who crops up throughout the show, much to the delight of everyone in the audience.
I hope that this review motivates you to check out Rob Auton’s funny and hopeful CAN.
CAN is running until 24 August at 139 Upstairs at Assembly Roxy.
Buy tickets here.
Image courtesy of Matt Stronge, provided to The Student as press material.