Candace Bryan: Don’t Be Ridiculous, Everybody Wants This comedy review – Relatable consumption
Our capitalist instincts are put under the microscope in an hour that’s coolly relatable
It’s not easy being a shopaholic when you were raised by a communist father. In this hour of stand-up, Candace Bryan takes us through the moral weeds of ethical consumption when you can’t even shop at your local supermarket without supporting a warmongering investment firm. Bryan is your archetypal left-leaning millennial hipster who uses self-awareness as their primary mode of self-defence against the guilt of their own privilege; and she knows it. Why, then, could she not stop herself buying a Shrek bucket hat from Amazon? In a world where you can purchase The Communist Manifesto on Prime, then rate it 3.69 stars on Goodreads, the answer is easier to see than the solution.
Instagram ads, Klarna and Deliveroo are, Bryan knows, the tools by which a consumer is lulled into political apathy. Yet just as she can’t quite boycott them in life, her show, too, offers little resolution. Here ending falls slightly flat, especially after some safely pre-memeified references to Twilight, Sex And The City, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Bernie Sanders. As a result, the show feels comfortingly relatable, though sometimes at the expense of its own novelty.
Candace Bryan: Don’t Be Ridiculous, Everybody Wants This, Gilded Balloon Patter House, until 31 August, 4pm; picture: Rebecca Need-Menear.