Another year, another Wells Comedy Festival. It is dusk on Friday evening, the first night of the festival, and we have just sped from Bristol through the cowslips and lush greenery of the summer Somerset countryside to Mat Ewins’ 9.30pm show.
Flicking through the programme, I was pleased to see that there were only two more men in total on the line-up than women, although I didn’t do any sort of calculations as to whether men on average had more prestigious time slots or more shows in the bigger theatres. Out of twenty-six performers, I counted only three people of colour, so this is certainly something to improve on next year.
Mat Ewins’ comedy is hard to describe giving it the credit it deserves; his stand-up is primarily set-ups for clips and games programmed by him on a projector screen, but it’s some of the most unashamedly silly and inventive out there. When I saw his show Danger Money at the Fringe in 2022, the room was packed despite minimal publicity, and the atmosphere was hysterical and delirious, only becoming more so as the room got warmer and drunker. Sadly on this evening Ewins is in the smaller of the two rooms available at the Wells Little Theatre, but the audience are thrilled to be there, myself included.
Ewins is here to perform his 2024 Fringe show, Ewins Some You Lose Some – one of the best pun titles I’ve seen – and he comes to the stage in a full suit, wearing a Guitar Hero guitar-shaped controller to cue the projector. He gets straight into it, and the clips come quick and fast, some of them familiar from previous shows, but still as funny as ever; a poltergeist who can only reach lower cupboards, a glitchy Fifa 19 Ronaldo, sailing a boat (with fellow comedian Pierre Novellie as the figurehead). There’s a rising sense of hysteria that characterises the best stand-ups I’ve seen; the best moments are unexpected but brilliantly specific and immediately funny, such as a clip of a teacher who has the school teatowel as a duvet cover. He elevates things with enjoyably janky additions like a program that spits out faux comments from audience members in apparently real time as the show is ‘live-streamed’, or a pop up screen version of himself that commentates sardonically on their jobs when he does crowdwork. It’s enjoyably silly and endearing.
The most exciting moments for me however are the audience interaction, such as a shooter game featuring his mum and played by audience participants, which displays the extent of Ewins’ programming ability. He scatters in elements of his personal life to create an overarching narrative, discussing trying to make it as an actor and his relationship with his fiancée, but it feels more than a little cursory as they are rarely more than a few sentences before being undercut by clips. The most delirious and memorable moment for me comes when another audience member plays a game version of Ewins’ proposal, which spirals into a musical number with a spinning genie version of him; the combination of the visuals, music, and rising (fake) chaos is so fun that it feels like a natural peak that would’ve worked better at the end.
The hour speeds by, although the ending feels somewhat sudden, with the payoff from his fiancée (and tech support) leaving midway without explanation resolved with a throwaway gag. Both this and his wider narrative about acting feel superficial; it’s a tricky line to walk, because his material is so visual and gag-based, and he doesn’t quite manage it; he’d be better off finding a different, more surreal through line altogether.
Although for me it didn’t feel quite fully cohesive, there’s so much to Ewins’ shows that the traditional rules don’t seem to apply. It takes tremendous skill to conceive and create so many varied visual elements, and so much of it feels peerlessly inventive. He has come closer to mainstream success the past few years, appearing on 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Live from the BBC, and it seems incredible he is not more famous beyond the Fringe despite nearly fifteen years of shows. His anarchic, ruthlessly inventive work is so singular that it would be huge fun to see what he would do with a TV show commission.