one4review | On 12, Aug 2026

I did not expect an AI to be able to make me Laugh but today, it actually did.

Garrett Millerick is a grumpy middle-aged man. He is all of the things you might expect a grumpy middle-aged man to be, not liking the left or the right ( he’s also pretty funny)— and he has built an AI chatbot.

Millerick is engaging and boisterous and grandstands us into his way of thinking, he is a real showman effortlessly holding the room’s attention.

The premise is that he has spent seven months building an AI chatbot. Now, he’s decided to let it take over his comedy show. Millerick has written three short stand-up sets, covering trope topics and then asking the chat bot to compete against him on each – but he lets us decide by phone vote.

The piece on male loneliness in particular is excellent: an admittedly problematic position put forward by Millnick really is a well polished piece of stand up. That would make anyone laugh anywhere.

The AI is given tropey subjects and actually does quite a strong bit making the entire audience genuinely laugh.(this was not the only time the AI did that!)

Millerick also invites audience members onstage to perform comedy written for them by the chatbot. It’s an incredibly neat and funny set he’s created and this bit really tickled all of us..

Then he has the AI have a go at a subject we choose to give it (we choose a rather weird subject of a thing being stuck in a dark cage or something) – it’s glitchy, awkward and simply not very funny.

However when writing on the screen and the roasting the chatbot actually outperformed Millerick himself (although it is himself just coded into digital form – he reminds us)

Underneath all this technological mucking about, however, there’s something deeper going on. Millerick is thinking about his daughter, the world she is going to inherit and what happens when AI becomes an unavoidable part of it

His grumpiness gives him the perfect position from which to interrogate all of this: in need of the technology while remaining deeply suspicious of what we’re doing with it. I just want to say there must have been a gargantuan amount of work programming all this – it really is impressive.

There’s a lot packed into the hour, including a surprisingly effective ending in which Millerick leaves us behind altogether in quite beautiful fashion.

If the entire hour were as packed with jokes as Millerick’s three-minute stand-up sections, this would be a five-star show. He is consistently interesting, engaging and entertaining, and the experiment itself is genuinely fascinating enough to carry the yet to be smoothed or punched up stretches.

We Tried It Your Way is clever, ambitious and genuinely interested in what happens when a comedian gives a machine a platform to be funny.

****
Reviewed by Stephen “Sharpie” Sharp
Pleasance Courtyard
Until 30th August (not 10th 17th or 24th)
16.35 (1 hour)