Luke Graves: A Degree Of Comedy

"There's a degree of comedy in everything," says Graves, to which you kind of think, "yeah, we'd heard". It's a lead in to a fairly straightforward observational set which is decent enough but not really beyond the level you'd see in a support act at your local comedy club.

He's got a few decent yarns, like proposing on Facebook, eavesdropping on strangers arguing and a silent disco gone badly wrong. There's no structure or connection between the stories, but it's all pretty good with a couple of decent laughs and the rest is carried along by his nervous charm. He's very much in the "nice guy" school of comedy, but there's nothing wrong with that.

And that's kind of the thing about the show: there's nothing really wrong with it. It's an entertaining enough hour and nobody seems particularly displeased at the end. The problem is that it doesn't really stand out from any other decent standup set, and it's definitely not strong enough to compete with the hundreds of other shows at the Fringe. All in all, you get the feeling that you're watching a promising new comedian who has decided to do Edinburgh a bit too early in his career. He's not the only one and he's nowhere near the worst, but this simply isn't the best use of your time during August.