A Bit of Everything in His Cup: A Review of Mike Rice’s Cruel Little Man

★★★½

Mike Rice walks on stage with an almost empty plastic cup, beelining toward the audience to ask them to fill it with heavy pours from their own mix of beverages. With unimaginable difficulty shifting into practiced ease, he finishes the drink clean by the end of his tight one-hour set. It’s impressive enough if you don’t count that he also performs a stand-up set, and one-handedly attempts his best to scare the youth of Edinburgh out of their bathroom cocaine habit. As a credit to his comedy, each lad who ran off to the toilets, occasionally receiving a light onstage thwack from Rice’s paddle, eventually returned to hear the rest of the set. 

With a clearly polished hour of material, Rice is an obvious pro onstage. Relaxed and charismatic, he is a natural. Almost reading as a how-to for new comedians, Rice moves between rules of three, regular callbacks, and easy repetitive crowd work. It’s textbook, and perhaps like most textbooks, it lacks a bit of originality and genuine connection. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the likes of Alfie Dundas and Lara Ricote’s shows this Fringe, but I found myself yearning for a bit more than jokes. While tight and controlled, the true moments of genius from Rice came not from his written material but from the moments he broke character. 

Each time a young man lumbered and stomped down the ridiculously loud stairs to scurry off to the toilets, Rice stopped his set and became lucid. Insanely quick and witty in his responses to these interruptions, Rice betrays his occasionally dimwitted performance of himself to reveal the truth: an impressively sharp comedian. 

Perhaps most disappointingly, in a festival increasingly populated by the wealthy and privileged (at least in the comedy category), Rice has the opportunity to bring more originality and identity to his work as a whole: to interrupt this predominantly English and (more and more) American space, bringing material only he and he alone could tell. Skating over much of that to largely discuss dating stories, and practice his impression of a person with an intellectual disability (though he’s really woke so it’s funny, right?), Rice renders his set nearly forgettable.

Elena Cebulash