EdFringe Review: Chris Grace: 88%

There’s something very sophisticated about Chris Grace’s stand-up, an artful blend of acting skill and left-field opinions which prompts thought as well as laughter. In 88%, his new show, he’s out to prove you can be slightly mad at someone (say maybe 12%?) and still be friends.

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It’s a rare, if cheeky, attempt to inject some nuance into a Fringe stand-up scene which can tend to the all-or-nothing; and it works a treat. Smartly, he keeps most of his set super-personal, drawing from a rich well of lived experiences. Context, he suggests, has never been more important to how people relate to the world around them. ‘Problematic’ attitudes to sex, Artificial Intelligence, and politics look less toxic when you switch the players involved and their motivations. Hate AI? What if it’s helping save lives? Think enormous age-gap relationships are bad? What if it involves your favourite LGBTQI+ celebrity? He drops these little context-bombs very deftly throughout the set – never predictably, and always with hilarious results.

Grace isn’t out to give a comedy lecture, however – he’s here to entertain. Chris, we discover, is a rare breed of obsessive social media warrior, and he mines his Facebook thread antics for lots of chuckles. Then there’s his love of gay saunas and fast food, something you’d think shouldn’t really be combined… On one level, he’s weaving in ‘gay lifestyle’ material you’ll have heard in other ways before, but his way of looking at it is wry and deliciously self-aware. His knack for visual storytelling really comes to the fore here! It’s also a continuing hoot every time he tells an edgy gag and explains why he’s allowed to tell it.

Navigating Tricky Topics and Cultural Context

Throughout, he throws out opinions, most of which I agreed with, but not all. When he says he has opinions he wouldn’t dare share, I believe him. I’m sure the bits on the ongoing invasion of Palestine would scandalise some rooms in the USA, but not here. For me, his closest flirtation with danger, in the UK certainly, comes when discussing Tourette’s campaigner John Davidson’s BAFTA SNAFU. Being a bit more informed about the situation, I think Grace’s musings are unhelpful.

Could he push the controversy boat out even further? Maybe. But in featuring AI quite so prominently, he’s sticking his neck out rather far where other performing creatives are concerned. I think he makes an incredibly fair, and funny case for using ‘the giant supercomputer’, but perhaps you can hear, like me, the distant sound of pencils being sharpened for war. At least in my case, Chris Grace only managed to annoy me a little, and never without making me laugh at the same time.

Of course, it may be because Grace is so relatable from start to end that his thornier material seems so reasonable. Sure, his lifestyle is alien to mine in some ways, but we’ve all been in a situation where a friend or acquaintance has said something ‘awful’, and bravely confronted it by doing nothing at all. To weave a fantastic hour of stand-up around this tacit tolerance is more than a little artful. It’s not the most side-splittingly funny show you’ll ever see, but it’s masterfully delivered, whip smart stuff all the same.

I’ve been meaning to catch Chris Grace for a couple of Fringes now, and I’m glad I finally have. This is a smart, skilful comedian making good comedy out of tricky, divisive material, and without (overly) alienating anyone in the room. This is definitely a show to catch if you like smart comedy delivered with a side of acting excellence.

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