Buckets of charisma, absurd stories but daunting punchlines
As the male heir of a wealthy family doing comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe, Alfie Dundas maybe doesn’t have the most unique position in the festival. What he does have is buckets of charisma, some utterly ridiculous stories and and captivating way of telling them. First Class Panic is a show revolving around the contradiction of Alfie’s upper class background, and his life as a stand-up comedian, as well as just stories from the other side of the wealth gap.
This background is a rich vein for anecdotes that are unpredictable, usually absurd, and often involve Alfie as the butt of the joke, and lucky we are to have such a good storyteller – like having campfire tales beside a country estate. He delights in wordplay – often pulling out a clever pun immediately after a dad joke that makes us all cringe, and his observational comedy helps even the most extravagant tale have a relatable angle to it despite the glitz or glamour.
Alfie plays well with an arrogant, pompous demeanour at times, sometimes telling the audience they’re a bit slow after doing a bit of wordplay or historical reference, but when he says it after the 4th Huel themed punchline in a row it is slightly grating instead of ingratiating. It felt like he was missing a counterweight or tension to some of these ‘posh’ jokes and the personality he portrays so confidently, threes nothing wrong with playing the bad guy and certainly as he jokes about the class makeup of comedians during the fringe there is a refreshing honesty to it. However it felt a lot of a time like a crutch getting in the way of good joke writing, charismatic energy and great storytelling abilities that Alfie has. His material about being someone from a posh background who doesn’t quite always fit in socially or politically there is something that feels unique to him that we could do more with rather than yet another Huel/ice plunge/any other mildly expensive thing you should be slightly ashamed of enjoying publically -based punchline.
During the shows conclusion this veneer withers away as he talks us through a very candid, and emotionally heavy event of his childhood that he flips on it’s head for laughs, creating the right mix of gasps and cackles from all of us. Here his storytelling, posh persona and swashbuckling demeanour breaks the tension like a sledgehammer and had everyone in stitches. The show was frustrating because the highs were so high, but the repetitive nature of a lot of the jokes ended up making me feel somehow guilty for laughing when he does pull out a wicked delivery of a punchline involving small boat crossings and regattas. It did end on all of it’s strongest material, which only made the flaws more obvious. It’s hard to recommend for it’s price point, and maybe Alfie’s class material works better as the enemy in a London comedy club than at the more comfortable territory of an overwhelmingly middle class fringe.
You can see Alfie Dundas: First Class Panic at Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker Three every night at 7:15pm apart from the 18th
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/alfie-dundas-first-class-panic