Rich Spalding: Gather Your Skeletons

Edinburgh Fringe – The Pleasance

Death and the afterlife are quite unlikely topics or sources of humour for a stand-up comedy show, just from the juxtaposition alone. Rich Spalding’s debut hour Gather Your Skeletons not only proves that this is a false premise – or at least the exception to the rule – throughout the rest of the hour, that is  full to the brim of good-natured humour and amusement. 

Gather Your Skeletons revolves around a theory that Spalding was reminded of by his mother about what happens after we die and how it relates to the film, Groundhog Day, and this serves as the basis on which a lot of the material is built on, and links his anecdotes together rather than overpowering the entire hour.

As far as material goes, it’s unusually astonishing how Spalding can so easily switch between talking about these grand themes and mundane occurrences in the same breath, as though they were one and the same; so ordinary it doesn’t merit notice, which is a refreshing perspective.  Even though it’s a show that tiptoes around some intense questions, it doesn’t feel like too philosophical or academic or miserable to think about. He tackles a potentially dark subject with light humour. It’s a show that makes you think hard, but it’s not completely existentialist. It has just enough elements of it that just clicks something into place in our mind, another viewpoint to consider.

“Gather your skeletons and go see Richard Spalding.”

It’s such an unobtrusive show, with a gentle rhythm where punchlines hit us out of nowhere. At every anecdotal point, even though the material has tendency towards self-depreciation, Spalding is almost laughing with us in hindsight, almost leading by example to a healthy way to look at these individual days of our lives. The aspects and tools of comedy that he needs to build up an hour, come naturally to Spalding; he is a  natural at comic timing, he’s effortlessly funny and he knows how to build up this kind of feeling where we feel like we know where he’s going before he diffuses it himself. And it is in that gap in particular, between what we think he’s going to say and what he says that is ripe for hilarity. There’s just something so unexpected about the direction of his material that we’re just constantly laughing, constantly waiting for where he might take us next. 

This is a really life-affirming and a strong hour to the point where it seems like Spalding has just been doing this forever, it’s amazing to think that this is just his debut show. One can’t help but wait eagerly for what Spalding might do next. It is essential that everyone see this show at least once, and it’s absolutely not hyperbole to say that doing whatever you can to get a ticket is a must. Gather your skeletons and go see Richard Spalding. The day we see him perform is the day we’d be happy to repeat.

 

By Katerina Partolina Schwartz

Photo Credit: Jamie Drew