Review: Teet (Paul Currie, The Hive)

I should probably preface this review by admitting I’m hardly unbiased here. I first saw Paul Currie in 2018, his show Hot Donkey had me in stitches seconds after starting. Teet is the newest hour of...whatever it is Currie does (and only he does it), and I’m happy to say he’s as batshit beautiful as ever.

It’s probably a bad year to say his comedy is infectious, but infectious it is and after the shit-show of the last eighteen months, seeing Currie do his thing in a room full of strangers did more for my morale than either vaccine dose (no, but actually do get jabbed, it’s really important). Packed into the infamously sweaty Hive nightclub in Edinburgh, Currie enters clad in a huge Grim Reaper costume, with big skeletal hands. He performs Australia’s origin story with just the word potato. He uses asparagus and dairylea triangles as instruments. He gives impassioned speeches about gender politics. He gets us to whisper ‘Boris is a ballbag’ down the phone. He does all this, and so much more, directing the energy in the room like a maniacal conductor let loose in a costume shop.

There’s generosity in Teet too, and a warm commitment to his philosophical tangents that you can’t help but get onboard with. Yeah, you’re right Paul, gender is a construct, and it is fucking weird that we still drink milk! He weaves together a critique of binary gender roles and colonialism with wonderfully inventive skits in the most bizarre fashion, and yet somehow they seem to compliment each other perfectly.

I can’t really find the words to capture him, or exactly what it is he does, or exactly why it’s so funny. It would be insane to call Currie a stand up comedian, he’s a sit-down, get-up, run-around, climb-a-ladder, read-a-poem, do-a-dance, lip-sync-a-song comedian. And that’s not even the half of it. You have to experience it to believe it, but if you see one show in Edinburgh this year, as always, my recommendation is Currie.

Teet is on until the of August, for more information and tickets click here.