Scotsman 5stars 2025

︎︎︎︎︎ The Scotsman (link to original)

Nate Kitch: Something Different!!!!!
published 7th August 2025

“A five-star masterclass in comic deconstruction from Nate Kitch

This is a show for true comedy aficionados. Not because it is very, very funny – which it is. But because it plays with so many comic ideas, techniques and formulas. It’s like one of those posh restaurants where they take something like a Caesar salad and serve all the ingredients as separate portions. Or it’s like a Matisse painting, or like jazz, where all the bits fly apart and regroup in an order that simultaneously makes sense – and doesn’t.

On the other hand, it is very much like the Morecambe and Wise sketch, where Eric Morecambe plays all the right notes “but not necessarily in the right order.”

Oh my god. Nate Kitch has infested my review with his crazy deconstructionist ideas. Some people say Kitch is anti-comedy, but actually he loves it a lot. There are always other comics in the room and he plugs their shows, willingly disrupting his own in the process. He’s a great fan of leaving the room and disappearing behind the blackout curtains. At one point he even manages to usher someone from another queue into his show, making the audience and the abductee fall about laughing “What show IS this?” says the baffled Dutch woman. She looks as if she really wants to stay.

Kitch sends up the fabled emotional arc of the Edinburgh show, accidentally ruining his own 45-minute “sad bit” with a technical error. He mixes up biographical details of his own family and wildly exaggerates mild health scares in the name of “using your own life history as material”. Kitch loves the confusion, he loves the lulls. He batters his own props, takes phone calls on stage, repeats himself and appears to lose the plot. There’s an awful lot of toilet jokes in the show, which is puzzling until Nate reveals his highly fictional “How I became a comic” backstory.

He’s at the Gilded Balloon but with some Pay What You Want seats, which allows him to make a bucket speech which is a comic masterclass in desperation, bitterness and fake sincerity. Oh, and this year he has a hat, which takes centre stage in a hopelessly misremembered classic comedy routine. Oh, that Nate Kitch. What a trickster. My cheeks were aching from laughing after seeing this show. I’d go again in a heartbeat. Did I mention he has a hat? “

by CLAIRE SMITH