Chris Weir: Well-Flung

Edinburgh Fringe – Gilded Balloon

Chris Weir’s Well-Flung is a nice story of self-exploration, but it isn’t much more than that. He is so concerned with getting through the narrative, that he doesn’t really stop to consider how it affects the comedy, and we can often go for long-stretches without any humorous break in the story. 

This subversion of the rom-com is definitely a unique choice of genre to try and replicate, but how effective it is another question. There’s a sleepy atmosphere in the room, and that’s really due to Weir’s style of comedy, which lends to the feeling of this being quite a casual show but more spoken word theatre than stand-up comedy. The jokes are wrapped into the story in a kind of dry irony, but otherwise there’s no obvious set-up and then punchline. The jokes are often more in what Weir says and how he says it, but sometimes even his tone isn’t a particularly helpful indicator that something is meant to be funny than just an extension of a description. He tends to focus on wordplay and innuendo to shock us into laughter, which admittedly does work, but to varying degrees of success.

“More spoken word theatre than stand-up comedy”

The point of the show as Weir would have us believe is underdeveloped, this idea of companionship and what we do for it. It’s more stated as an after-thought than something that we could consider a reoccurring theme as such; if Weir doesn’t out-rightly telling us that he’s leading to this kind of analysis, there isn’t enough for us to grasp at anything for ourselves. We really only know that there’s this running theme because he tells us there is.  

As a comedy set, Well-Flung doesn’t really come across as such. There’s meaning to be found here, but it would be helpful if it were more explicitly stated so that we could see that there’s more in this story for ourselves, Well-Flung is an easy listen, if not always the most funny. 

By Katerina Partolina Schwartz

Photo Credit: Andrew Jackson