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	Pleasance Courtyard (venue website) Comedy 1-12, 14-26 Aug, 8:30pm-9:30pm Reviewed by Liam McKenna
Recommended for age 14+ only.

At 24, Joe Lycett has a budding career in comedy ahead of him. For now he’s performing inside a sweltering pre-fab, but he won’t be able to maintain a venue this small for long. And if you were unfamiliar with Lycett before the show, he doesn’t take much time acquainting you during the customary voiceover introduction – when he pokes his head out of the curtain to wave and say he’ll be with us in a moment, before diving back in.

His cheeky, likeable persona endears him to the audience. He starts off “with his penis… to get it out the way.” He tells us he hates it. “It’s too sensitive.” He moves onto sex – and his preferences therefor. He says he is bisexual. He asks a gay member of the audience what he thinks of bisexuals; “admirable,” is the reply.

Lycett is constantly making sure everyone is on his wavelength, making good friends with a couple at the front who own an expensive B&B, and sitting in the back row to talk to one man who he suspects may be on ketamine (inconclusive) about Grindr (an iPhone application that equates to a “gay-tracking device”).  All in all, he talks to us like friends in a pub.

The show is primarily about Lycett’s issues with gender, sexuality, masculinity. He’s trying to find out what makes “a man”. He’s dealt with homophobia, as a child in the playground, and more recently with the most masculine person he’s ever met – his personal trainer. The latter says things like “I can lift a car,” with no prompt whatsoever.

Throughout the hour it seems as if Lycett is trying to get to the bottom of whether or not this whole masculinity thing is even important to him; and of course the conclusion is, roughly speaking, no. But in trying to be more of a man, we hear some of Lycett’s best escapades: “trying football”, ordering a white wine spritzer in an old man’s pub, and causing havoc in a fancy boutique with a Gregg’s sausage roll, purely out of a sense of mischief.

A journey into Joe Lycett’s world is a whirlwind of personal, true stories (there’s even a newspaper cutting to verify one of them), rich with vivid characters who, for the most part – bar the sick and dying orphans with whom he uses to try to sway the council – are also real. There’s the 83-year-old youth-hating neighbour who wants to return a 15-year-old kettle to Woolworth’s, and Jim Davidson, who Lycett takes great pride in having censored his material.

It’s a captivating hour in the presence of a charming young comedian. Lycett knows where to find the funny side in otherwise socially-awkward, and often excruciating, situations. He’s good when just riffing with the audience, and when he’s endorsing a fizzy grapefruit drink. Yes, there might be the odd innuendo which puts him in touching distance of the Alan Carr and Graham Norton-end of the comedy spectrum, but (like Carr and Norton, to be fair) he mainly sticks to the outright humour. Anyway, his beaming personality lets him gets away with any innuendos he can’t resist. Even in front of Celtic fans. This is a comedian going places.