Edinburgh 2013: Adam Buxton's Kernel Panic is comedy for the YouTube generation

Adam Buxton

If you like to spend your free time laughing at mad, misspelt and hyperbolic comments on web forums, then Adam Buxton's brand of piss-take comedy for the YouTube generation will be right up your street.

In Bug, a regular fixture at London's BFI Southbank, Buxton offers up a multimedia presentation from the helm of his MacBook, involving music video clips, highlights from the related comments and short, surreal animations made by Buxton himself (mostly involving his face). His Edinburgh gig covers much the same ground.

David Bowie has long been revered by Buxton, and he intersperses clips of the Thin White Duke looking particularly mad and/ or pathetic throughout the show. Buxton’s mastery of the software is impressive. He even includes a series of files he “accidentally” reveals to the audience, such as, “Dreams of me bumming Joe” (Cornish, his old comedy partner). It’s puerile but it works.

As he reads out the comments in a range of silly, mostly Eastern European accents, you begin to question whether it might be possible to have the same amount of fun at home alone with a laptop and a bottle of cheap Merlot. But no, Buxton manages to draw out the ridiculousness of each comment to full effect and the exaggerated, yet strangely similar accents seem strangely apt. "This year was s*** begunned" a perplexing quote taken from a YouTube response to David Bowie's The Next Day, which Buxton reads in a cockney/Jamaican patois, has already become a popular catchphrase among the Edinburgh crowd.