Edinburgh comedy reviews: the funniest shows at the 2024 Fringe
Amy Gledhill: Make Me Look Fit on the Poster ★★★★★
Where: Monkey Barrel (Monkey Barrel 1)
Time: 6.10pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: Gledhill’s Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show has been packing them in at the Monkey Barrel club; it now deserves a huge audience and would surely sit happily on stage at the Palladium. On paper, it might sound flimsy stuff – tales at her own expense, not least the relived embarrassment of a disastrous visit to an outdoor activities centre, rendered with immaculate, toe-curling physicality, and the time she mistakenly condescended to a Hollywood child-star.
Yet every minute of it is informed by the Hull-born comic’s larger than life personality and innate capacity to strike a connection – and what emerges through the hilarity is the sense of someone confronting self-esteem issues, our laughter itself becoming an invitation to make us consider our assumptions. DC
Josh Glanc: Family Man ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel (Monkey Barrel 1)
Time: 3.20pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: In a nutshell: Australian comic Josh Glanc [pronounced Glance] switched from a career as a lawyer into the relative chaos of comedy, but he has embraced that world with such winningly fresh zaniness that it’s as if he has created his own rules-based system. In fact, you wouldn’t want to be up against him in a courtroom – his ability to wrong-foot his audience, and disrupt expectations, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye (and much belly-hair exposed thanks to a cropped top), signals a shrewd sense of command and organisation.
In essence, Glanc offers a great reel of nonsense, and reels within reels – a show that keeps being restarted, dippy songs that recur like running gags, oddball interactions with the crowd (variously invited to embrace their inner slut, pose for photos, and establish the latest offer on the website of a well-known pizza chain). It’s all in the timing, the tease, the inter-play – and such is Glanc’s supreme charisma that even as the show doesn’t feel like it will ever end, you don’t want it to. DC
Chris Cantrill: Easily Swayed ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel (The Tron)
When: 12.10pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: Yorkshireman Chris Cantrill’s inclusion on this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award shortlist attests to the fact that, like Amy Gledhill, his co-nominee (and comedy partner in The Delightful Sausage) he’s had a good year, proving himself capable of an hour that combines strong gags, and phrasing (let’s hear for it human existence being likened to brilliant software operating on hardware that’s “essentially a carrier-bag of slowly rotting meat”) with a compelling narrative – to wit, a midlife urge to don a cape and find a sense of mission, even if it’s only confusing supermarket employees. The garrulity and cheer coax you into something at once signposted and surprising, a punch-to-the-gut confrontation with undeclared male mental health crises. DC
Reuben Kaye: Live and Intimidating ★★★★☆
Where: Assembly George Square Gardens (Palais du Variete)
When: 8.05pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: The Australian drag artist, singer and comedian thoroughly deserved the attention he got as a big comedy contender this year, despite performing slightly off the beaten track in a beautiful George Square Spiegeltent: revelatory to me was not only his stage-presence - prowling, mischievous and engaging – but his capacity to combine shock-laughs with a shrewd, and satirical, analysis of current affairs.
In Live and Intimidating, he addresses the backlash that occurred after he took part in the 2019 Channel 4 show Kids React to Drag, and there’s anger as he addresses resurgent reactionary tendencies in Australia, the UK and the US, but the aim of the game is to entertain and this he does with often unprintable relish and neo-Wildean flair. DC
Catherine Bohart: Again, With Feelings ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Barrel 3)
When: 12pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: The Irish comedian’s hyper-loquacity almost puts you in mind of Beckett’s Not I; you marvel at her ability to keep all the words coming in the right order, and never miss a trick, or lose a laugh. The material itself addresses some of the issues arising from her having a younger girlfriend, and being in her thirties – weighing freezing your eggs or your forehead, the seized-on latter option resulting in a typically breathless and amusing vignette.
It’s the casual lyrical rush of it all that enchants, and there are pin-prick moments of recognition; her mother, she advises, worries about her own demise and frets that her children will wrangle over heirlooms. “There’s no polite way to say this,” she grins, wincing at the thought of the potential possessions she’s in line to inherit, “there’s not going to be a row!” Terrific stuff. DC
Elf Lyons: Horses ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Pleasance Above)
Time: 9.20pm
Until: Aug 26
In a nutshell: “Everything you are about to see is real,” deadpans Lyons at the start, in a consciously cut-glass accent, miming the offering and lighting of a cigarette in an ice-breaking interaction with the front-row, and making the ludicrous yet spellbinding claim that she is about to “bring a real horse on stage”. Our imaginations thus primed, we’re treated to the dance-enactment of the birth of a horse that might invite sniggers at its pretention, but Lyons executes the staggering, blinking arrival of the foal with such grace and focus that thereafter, even as she moves in more ostentatiously absurd directions (conjuring the story of Pegasus and, with the help of volunteers, the Trojan horse), the equine-mimicking larks are saddled to a quietly thundering sincerity.
The passion that informs the unfettered clowning (and she is superbly expressive, stamping and staring, nibbling and neighing, but talking in character too) becomes more transparently allied to her love of horsing around with her siblings as a kid. Bit by bit you, realise she’s looking at the loss of childhood innocence and youthful dreaming and how we might achieve an impossible jump back to it. I’ve come across people who were bored by this show; it won’t be for everyone, but I adored every silly-filly bit of it and I can’t think of many performers who combine such bravura comic invention with such livewire pluck. DC
Milo Edwards: How Revolting! Sorry to Offend ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel (Monkey Barrel 2)
Time: 5.45pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: “Two dead parents, zero awards” mock-gripes Milo Edwards about the reception to his last show. So, natter of a heartstring-tugging aspect has been eschewed in favour of a show “about the s--- that pisses me off” – a statement of uncharacteristic crudeness because the beauty of this gripe-strewn, intelligence-steeped hour lies in its elegant, elaborate turns of phrase. Edwards’s prime object of annoyance is the class-system, and the way he gets bracketed as posh, despite his ordinary Essex background, because he went to Cambridge. “We love going ‘He went to Waitrose once…’” nails our knee-jerk hierarchy-enforcing; the word ‘innit’ conversely (and comically) is seized on as proof of someone lacking class.
Edwards’s sardonic, whining persona will grate with some but it feels narkily ‘now’ – and, to pilfer a few of the top-brass riffs and one-liners, his teasing advocacy of abolishing the Royal Family on the right-wing grounds that they’re “the only recipients of the only social welfare programme we have left” and description of an online police speed-awareness course thus – “It was held on Zoom, which is ironic” - suggest he must surely go onwards and upwards, downwardly mobile country permitting. DC
Dan Tiernan: Stomp ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel (Monkey Barrel 1)
When: 9pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: A nominee for last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award Best Newcomer, Tiernan may not have pushed onto the main-list this year, but his second Edinburgh show confirms the Mancunian’s ample potential. On paper, it’s yet another set in which a comic talks about personal challenges and conditions – here he alludes to his gay-awakening, his dyspraxia and neurodivergence – but the writing is invigoratingly flip and pin-sharp, self-aware rather than self-involved, and attains giddy peaks of performative derangement (cautionary note: beware the front-row).
An early opening gambit is the self-deprecating self-description: “I look like [I’m] really bad at maths, or really good at it” – and that mix of confidence and diffidence, likeability and peculiarity is shot through the hour. A propos his gout: “My sister is going through something similar – she’s got cancer.” A lot of dark, jaw-opening mischief, and a final flourish of surprisingly accomplished magic. DC
Olga Koch: Comes From Money ★★★★★
Where: Monkey Barrel (Monkey Barrel 3)
Time: 5.40pm
Unti: Aug 25
In a nutshell: “Growing up rich... affects up to one per cent of people”, says the Russian-British (American-accented) Olga Koch in what must rank as one of the boldest opening gambits of the festival. Instead of hiding her wealth and privilege, Koch acknowledges it with a winning combination of anecdotal assurance and dry detachment, with a dash of self-deprecation too – “This is the first comedy show to be written pool-side on Jeffrey Epstein’s island”, she quips. It’s as if she’s positioning herself inside the lion’s jaw of our disapproval, even detestation, then prising our features into beaming, even forgiving smiles.
In terms of bangs for your bucks, the gag-rate is high, the thematic pay-off strong too, as she queries the sundry privileges and head-starts that shape, and perhaps warp, our lives. To present this in the midst of a cost of living crisis, with Russia’s war in Ukraine the rumbling backdrop (she delves, a little, into her father’s source of wealth), takes some nerve. Whatever the outcome of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, we’ll see more of her. DC
Sarah Keyworth: My Eyes Are Up Here ★★★★★
Where: Monkey Barrel (Monkey Barrel 3)
Time: 1.25pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: It’s hard to believe there’s a warmer, funnier, more delectable hour to be found in all Edinburgh. One of Keyworth’s gags (“I’m an extremely emotionally needy non-binary person: my pronouns are ‘there there’”) made it onto U & Dave’s annual funniest jokes of the fringe list, which sums up Keyworth’s ability to cast a wry, succinct eye on their life and upbringing in a way that feels quintessentially British in its self-deprecating neurosis without becoming overly self-involved.
You might spot connections with Victoria Wood in the material’s affability and relish for a good turn of phrase, but in terms of both personal revelation (especially about recent top surgery) and political observation (railing against “sweeping statements about big groups of people” and poking fun at the monetisation of hatred), this is a distinctive voice, surely bound for stardom. DC
Jin Hao Li: Swimming in a Submarine ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Below; Cabaret Bar)
Time: 7.10pm (extra shows in Cabaret Bar Aug 22, 24)
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: Calm, softly spoken and with a mischievous glint in his eye, Jin Hao Li – born in China, raised in Singapore and St Andrews’ educated – acts as though he’s in possession of unusual wisdoms and a stash of sure-fire gags; and so it proves. “Swimming in a submarine” appears to derive its title from the memory of sitting in a hot-tub as a child, “the bathroom light bouncing off the waves” – and there’s a lyrical, child-like sensibility and unfettered surrealism at work, as this shrewd outsider-figure imagines, say, a spider and a ladybird flirting over their shared love of Corbusier, recounts his nightmares and dreams, offers the essential pillars of a good life (geometry, potty-training) and throws random questions our way. “Ask yourself: is the Hulk incredible? Man gets violent when angry – it’s credible…” On paper, it might sound too fey by half, but it gels beautifully and thoroughly merits its status as the cult find of the Fringe. DC
John Tothill: Thank God This Lasts Forever ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Beside)
Time: 8.45pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 12)
In a nutshell: As he told The Telegraph in July, John Tothill recently took part in a medical trial for malaria. It didn’t go as planned, and his brush with death provides a solid-gold ending to what’s surely one of the funniest hours of stand-up at this year’s Fringe. (Twenty-seven shows in, it’s the funniest I’ve seen so far.) But what a journey he takes to reach that anecdote, madly (and delightfully) pinballing all over the place.
Tothill is both a louche, hard-partying libertine and a primary-school teacher – and his adorably camp, effervescent stand-up style plays into both roles: patronising the slower pupils on one side of the room, dropping outrageous compliments to those on the other.
He spends the first 20 minutes promising to tell us the story of an obscure 1950s medical experiment on rats – but that routine’s endlessly postponed, sidetracked by his fast, flirty crowd work and own skittish thoughts. The atmosphere of fizzing spontaneity he creates is, of course, pure artifice, the seemingly off-the-cuff diversions all carefully planned, but each detour leads to the next so beautifully it’s impossible to see the joins. The hour’s neatly tied together by a carpe-diem message (like his 2023 debut, the set is essentially a geeky cri-de-coeur about hedonism). It’s hard to believe this is only Tothill’s second show; he’s completely in command of his distinctive, mischievous comic voice. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Natalie Palamides: Weer ★★★★★
Where: Traverse 1
When: 9.30pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: Sometimes the old jokes are the best, and the burlesque act known as the “half-and-half” is one of the oldest there is. For perhaps a hundred years, crowds have roared at the sight of two lovers played by one clown in a costume split down the middle (lipstick and frock on the left, half a beard and one trouser on the right). They dance and squabble and kiss, hands begin to wander, and clothes come flying off en route to the bedroom.
Natalie Palamides, one of the most thrillingly original comedians working today, has taken this ancient vaudeville routine and turned it into the must-see farce of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe: a spot-on homage to 1990s romantic movies, less a spoof than a chaotic love-letter to schmaltz, it left me with a big, dumb grin plastered across my face.
It’s New Year’s Eve 1999 – Y2K, baby! – and on-and-off couple Mark and Christina are arguing outside a party. Swivelling from left to right, Palamides cheekily side-eyes the audience throughout their spat, as if encouraging us to choose a side.
Flashbacks take us through their fractious relationship, beginning with their Hollywood meet-cute; that moment, when the pair bump into each other, spilling their Starbucks cups, is just one brilliant bit of physical comedy among many.
Palamides never writes scripts for her shows, but riffs them into existence through workshops and semi-improvised gigs. Given that, it’s remarkable how well-knit Weer feels, from its slick costume changes to its clever callbacks (a slow-detonating joke about a speech impediment manages to be simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking). Overrunning its advertised 75 minutes, it ought to feel as baggy as Mark’s ‘90s grunge jeans, but there’s not a dull moment.
I’ve been a fan of Palamides since her 2017 Fringe debut, Laid – a surrealist satire about the pressure put on women to have children, involving hundreds of smashed eggs. Nate (later a Netflix special) followed in 2018; a taboo-busting interactive hour about sexual consent, it left me thinking that here was a performer who could do absolutely anything – except make a show with commercial appeal.
Six years later, Palamides has proved me wrong: Weer is a bonafide mainstream hit. I haven’t seen a bit of Fringey tomfoolery so obviously ready for a West End transfer since Liz Kingsman’s One Woman Show.
A leopard doesn’t change its spots: it’s still a Palamides gig, which means you can still expect swearing, blood, death, sex and copious nudity (brace yourself for Mark’s rubber appendage), while a messy onslaught of prop comedy leaves the stage looking like a bomb site. But it’s the closest thing she’s ever made to a show for the whole family.
She’s dialled down her signature audience interaction from terrifying to merely mischievous, and thematically Weer only takes us to the edge of dark waters where Nate and Laid nose-dived straight in. Mark and Christina’s relationship might be toxic, but no more so than most 1990s romcom couples. They clash like Tom and Jerry, and the final act’s descent into Looney Tunes madness somehow contrives a heavenly feel-good finale. TFS
Tickets: traverse.co.uk
Matt Forde: The End of An Era ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance (Beyond)
When: 8pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: If a week is a long time in politics, then a year has represented aeons in the life of Matt Forde, the most topically incisive impersonator on the block (whose political podcast is a must-listen). At the end of 2023’s festival, he went for a check-up after experiencing pain in his left leg, and was diagnosed with cancer at the base of his spine.
“I’m alive and cancer-free,” he says, beaming, at the start to cheers but the physical cost has been immense – he’s reliant on a walking-stick and discloses some of the wince-making details of the surgery, which affected his bladder, bowels and much else besides.
Anyone who can see the funny side of having to live with a colostomy bag (“I’ve saved a fortune in bog roll!”) deserves a medal, but what’s even more impressive is that Forde, 41, doesn’t devote his hour to his medical travails – instead, he alludes to them in passing (and to increasingly poignant effect) while showing that he hasn’t lost his nerve in taking the political class to task.
His anatomisation of the many maddening deficiencies of gauche Sunak (skewered for his election campaign), nasal Starmer, starey Miliband, gobby Rayner, lordly Farage, plus Reform’s bovver boy Lee Anderson – with no blushes spared the SNP either – is a tonic; and while I hesitate to say he has a spring in his step, his riff about the near-assassinated Trump and what Blair would have said in his shoes is exemplary in its vocal accuracy and political acumen.
It’s laugh-a-minute stuff, underpinned by the kind of wisdom and natural resilience our leaders could learn from. He was always impressive, but he deserves his inevitable standing-ovation as never before. DC
Tickets: pleasance.co.uk
Lorna Rose Treen: Skin Pigeon ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Dome (10Dome)
When: 9.50pm
Until: Aug 12
In a nutshell: Judging the 2022 Funny Women Awards, I was knocked sideways by a young character comic called Lorna Rose Treen, who won both main prizes and has since racked up millions of views on Tiktok. Off the back of all that, her Fringe debut sold out its month-long run. Could it possibly live up to expectations?
The answer, thankfully, is yes. The stage is dominated by a giant mound of laundry; to cover her costume changes, Treen dives into it, crawls under it, or stands half-buried in it like Winnie in Happy Days. Dwarfed by the pile, she’s like a toddler playing in a dress-up box; it’s a perfect symbol for the joyous silliness of the hour.
The crew of misfits she embodies include a kind of feral Richard Curtis heroine hiding in your garden; a dolphin preening in a mirror; and “prolific author Sally Rooney” reading from her new children’s book. If the laughter flags in one surreal routine (about a cowboy with guns for hands) that only serves to highlight the ludicrously high hit-rate elsewhere.
Most sketch shows make the same mistake, of wringing every laugh from a skit till it’s dry, but here no routine outstays its welcome. Some of the funniest, including Treen’s turn as a headscarfed 1960s dolly bird, are over within one joke-packed minute. Skin Pigeon is a gloriously daft hour from one of the most exciting young comics around. TFS
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: edfringe.com
House of Life ★★★★★
Where: Underbelly, Cowgate (Belly Dancer)
When: 8.55pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 12)
In a nutshell: This is an unexpected pleasure. An hour in the company of “the RaveRend” (Ben Welch, arriving in a cloud of dry ice, with glitter-bedecked cassock and beard) and his deadpan sidekick “Trev” (Lawrence Cole, noddingly intent at keyboards and musical gadgets) surely ranks as the Fringe’s biggest feelgood sensation.
The duo promise to put us through a step programme to enlightenment, guaranteeing we’ll leave “never sad again”. The bonkers route to escaping the “rat-race ring-road of life” includes closing our eyes during a mass meditation to visualise meeting our “chicken mother” and intoning the mantra: “I am ready, I am strong, I am feeling myself like I never have before…”
Preposterous as it sounds, this simple spoof of spiritual uplift and insta-positivity, underpinned by gospel-style wailing and preacher-like exhortations, as well as live musical looping, manages both to laugh at itself and forge a genuine sense of collective transcendental release. “We wanted to make a show to make everyone happy while the world falls apart,” they explain at the unifying climax, which sees the DIY congregation pile on stage and decide the ending. Mission accomplished. DC
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 2)
When: 11.25pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 14)
In a nutshell: Welcome to The Misty Moon – “a workin’ men’s club in Rotherham, wot is also a portal to Hell” – where our compère is the roaring, hunchbacked Frankie Monroe. Is that red glow in his eyes a hint of something satanic – or just irritation from the Sudocrem inexplicably lathered all over his face?
One of the most buzzed-about debuts at this Fringe, Joe Kent-Walters’s demonically entertaining hour of character comedy is guaranteed to tickle any fans of The League of Gentlemen or The Delightful Sausage.
The idea is that Frankie Monroe – a monster mash-up of Tommy Cooper (there’s iffy magic), Les Dawson and Beelzebub – made a Faustian bargain to ensure his club would remain unchanged by the passing of time. And tonight, the Devil has come to collect his due – but not before one last variety show, where the acts include Frankie’s stage-shy nephew and a talentless Johnny Cash imitator (both Kent-Walters).
It’s a bravura performance, one best experienced after a couple of drinks. From the first minute, Kent-Walters conjures up this doomed club’s seedy atmosphere so vividly you can almost smell the fag ash. “I will be selling meat after the show!” he promises. “I’ve got ‘Taste the Difference’ lamb… Difference is, it’s mutton.” Boom-tish. TFS
Jack Tucker: Comedy Standup Hour ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Grand)
When: 11pm
Until: Aug 21 only
In a nutshell: Fans of the cult late-night Fringe cabaret Stamptown (see below) will know Zach Zucker already. As its host, the US comic keeps the chaos barely in check, while ad-libbing in character as a hopeless hack comic called “Jack Tucker”. In small doses, Jack is a fun intermezzo between the main acts - but can he fill an hour on his own? The answer, surprisingly, is yes: this loud, frenetic, anarchic show has the same party atmosphere as Stamptown (and, the night I caught it, the same propensity for over-running), but is unlike anything else.
It’s not really character comedy: as a creation, Jack’s paper-thin, and we get little sense of a distinct personality or story (besides a running gag about him being dumped by his wife). What the hour is, instead, is a full-throttle demolition of stand-up itself. Jack’s routines (about, say, the Weather Channel) are hopeless, but they’re also irrelevant; he can barely make it through a sentence - let alone a joke - without being interrupted.
When the distraction isn’t a stage-invasion from a roller-skating sweeper or a heartstring-tugging trumpeter (there to underscore the “sincere” moments), it’s Jack’s (or Zucker’s) mind interrupting itself, with an ever-growing array of callbacks. By the end of the show, these running jokes pile up until they’re arriving with strobe-light frequency, less gags than nervous tics, each one matched to a specific sound-effect, gunshot, explosion or deafening musical jingle (whenever Jack mentions our country of “United Kinglish”, for instance, he’s cut off by a two-second blast of Three Lions). I doff my hat to the lightning-fast, furiously overworked techie running his sound-desk. Comedy Standup Hour is exhausting, overwhelming – and very, very funny. TFS
[Reviewed at the Soho Theatre, London]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Mark Thomas: Gaffa Tapes ★★★★☆
Where: The Stand (1)
When: 6.30pm (also 1.15pm, 26 Aug)
Until: Aug 26 (not 12)
In a nutshell: Few comedians are politically clued up and quick-witted enough to be able to whip up material on the riots that have seized the UK this week. But that old south London firebrand Mark Thomas – 61, and rejuvenated by newfound love, we learn – proves our dependable guide to the chaos. Well, up to a point; those seeking a detailed, even-handed analysis need to look elsewhere. He offers a characteristically expletive-laden view, which holds no truck with the idea of these being legitimate protests: ““We’re concerned citizens.’ No, you’re not – concerned citizens write letters to newspapers and sign petitions, at worst they make t--ts of themselves on Question Time. They don’t try to burn hotels with human beings in them – that’s the work of fascism.”
Deprived of hope things will get better, these people, he avows, just want someone in Parliament to represent their grievances by ‘flicking the v’s’ to MPs. His battle-hardened advice, delivered with partial tongue in socialist cheek, is for “Angela Rayner ... to get behind Lee Anderson and chair the f---er”. He even admits to wanting the police to make full use of their batons. Disagree with his perspective if you will, but few come close to Thomas for trenchant spleen and satirical purpose; the strong ratio of hard-hitting matter to gag-rich mirth is a feat that makes other stand-up look idling and irrelevant. Whether denouncing Starmer’s Labour, rejoicing at the Tories’ implosion and with it the Rwanda scheme, Thomas hereby renews his mandate to rant. DC
Tickets: edfringe.com
Ada Campe: Big Duck Energy ★★★★☆
Where: The Stand Comedy Club (Stand 5)
When: 3pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 20)
In a nutshell: Coming across like a mix of Tommy Cooper, Ethel Merman and one of Bertie Wooster’s aunts, Ada Campe sings, cracks jokes, does magic tricks (via a mystical “connexion” with her mind-reading duck), and tells longwinded, wistful anecdotes about her life on stage. She’s such a delightfully dotty character, who more than fills the tiny room this show is in; her stories (which feature recurring characters from her previous shows) conjure up such a loveable world of fading vaudeville stars and clueless husbands who’ve “gorn orf” , that I want to believe she’s real.
With that in mind, this hour’s humdrum opening 10 minutes of stand-up about living in Croydon is, I suspect, a trick; it’s there to establish that what she’s saying is true, so you’ll swallow the tall tales that follow, about burning funfairs and marrying a magician. It punctures her world a little to learn that she won the Hackney Empire’s New Act of the Year (the award that helped launch the careers of Linda Smith, Lee Mack and Stewart Lee) in 2018 rather than, say, 1958. So let’s just pretend she didn’t. Ada is surely not just the silly alter-ego of serious academic and BBC New Generation Thinker Naomi Paxton. Ignore those scurrilous rumours, dahling. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Emma Sidi is Sue Gray ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Upstairs) [plus extra shows at 11.10pm, Aug 16 & 22, at Pleasance Dome (Queen Dome)]
When: 4.15pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: I’d never imagined civil servant Gray as a lairy The Only Way is Essex extra who calls Rishi Sunak “babes”, declares Keir Starmer to be “drippin’ with riz”, and resorts to speaking Spanish when anxious (a trait that’s hilariously unexpected the first time, albeit with diminishing returns). Still, after this bonkers show from one of the country’s best young character comics, I’ll never think of Labour’s éminence grise any other way. Forgive the slightly contrived last-minute slide into earnestness (“We are all Sue Gray,” Sidi declares – are we really?) and this is a winningly daft show.
We’re transported us to Gray’s office life, with her battered computer (she slaps the keyboard at random, like a cat playing piano), and her requent water-cooler breaks with her colleagues. Those breaks – a neat bit of wordless audience interaction set to cheesy Muzak – are so unashamedly only there to pad things out show that this becomes a kind of endearing meta-joke; Sidi radiates a mischievous delight in getting away with this non-impression for a whole show. One joke stretched out to an hour, perhaps, but what a joke – and what an hour. TFS Tickets for Aug 22 only
Furiozo: Man Looking for Trouble ★★★★☆
Where: Underbelly, Cowgate (Iron Belly)
When: 9.40pm
Until: Aug 25 (not Aug 19)
In a nutshell: A roaring hardman gangster with a secretly soft heart, Furiozo (apparently) snorts coke, bends steel bars and plays cops-and-robbers with the crowd – but proves surprisingly gentle with his audience volunteers. Gaulier-trained Polish clown Piotr Sikora’s almost wordless hour of character comedy is a reminder that laughter transcends language-barriers. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Abby Wambaugh: The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Attic)
When: 7.15pm
Until: Aug 26 (not 12)
In a nutshell: Here’s a clever idea. Abby Wambaugh’s delightful Fringe debut – a blend of stand-up and sketch comedy – supposedly gives us 17 wholly unrelated skits, each the start of a different show. In fact, it’s an autobiography in disguise, where every section ties in thematically to a milestone in Wambaugh’s life: first trying stand-up, moving to Holland, pregnancy, a miscarriage, parenthood, and returning to making shows after years of thinking “I’d never make anything except except breastmilk”.
Wambaugh is in the same poky attic room where Lorna Rose Treen (see below) had her breakthrough last year – and this show’s interactive moments have a similarly childlike sense of mischief, pulling up people from the front-row for an oddball take on parkour, or introducing us to the joys of mime basketball.
Too many Fringe comedies struggle to crowbar in tragedy, segueing awkwardly from breezy stand-up to the now seemingly obligatory “sad bit” near the end. Wambaugh circumvents that problem: the most heartfelt sections here are at once sincere and ironic, arriving via a spoof of New York storytelling shows such as The Moth and a David Sedaris-style essay, while the channel-hopping format means it’s natural to leap abruptly between a crushing revelation and, say, an uproarious impression of a Hoover. Utterly charming. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Vir Das: The Fool ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Dome (King Dome)
When: 8pm
Until: Aug 16
In a nutshell: “You understand that this ends horribly for you, right?” the cop asked Vir Das, shortly after confiscating his passport. The biggest star in India’s burgeoning stand-up scene, Das had a mixed bag of a year in 2023: he won an Emmy and played the Apollo, but was hauled into a police station on spurious charges, denounced by politicians, and even branded a “terrorist” for stand-up routines criticising the state of affairs in his home country. Angry mobs burnt effigies of him outside comedy clubs.
The flack he’s received makes British debates about free speech look a little parochial. But the rapturous reception (from a largely Indian crowd) in Edinburgh shows how much appetite there is for his work, despite any manufactured controversy.
This show’s first half – a clutch of observational routines, some slightly hacky jokes about vaping and Gen Z slang, and a winning skit imagining Hitler from his dog’s perspective – is solid enough, and he has a great riff that about that over-worked topic, gender-neutral pronouns. (If you’re frequently warned that “they” are out to get you, he jokes, the idea that “they” might refer to just one person is a blessed relief.) His charisma and confidence carries the material, even when it’s a little middle-of-the-road.
But The Fool reaches new heights, both literally and figuratively, when Das climbs up into the audience, away from the mic and camera onstage, to speak from the heart about all the reasons – personal and political – why speaking from the heart can be so difficult. “Can we be honest?” he asks, and in the brief silence afterwards has the whole crowd hanging on his next word. Das manages to make one of the Fringe’s larger venues feel intimate – no mean feat. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Mark Dean Quinn: Oh No (That’s Not Your Cheese)★★★★☆
Where: Banshee Labyrinth (Cinema)
Time: 1.50am
Until: Aug 25 (not 11, 18)
In a nutshell: Every year, as costs spiral, the Fringe becomes less Fringey. Yet its weird spirit lives on, if you know where to find it. Elsewhere you can see TV stars for £30, but in the darkest depths of the Free Fringe you can watch a man dressed as a whoopee cushion slowly destroy himself, one slice of cheese at a time.
Mark Dean Quinn’s 2024 show – which is, in fact, his 2023 show under a new title – starts around 2am, drawing a crowd of waifs and strays, drunken tourists looking to get out of the rain, and the odd hardcore devotee. (Last year, apparently, one came for six consecutive nights.)
It begins conventionally enough. The conceit is that he’s lost his voice – a conceit he demolishes repeatedly, by telling us about it every few minutes – and so he’s delivering his show via pre-written cue cards, a la Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. This generates around 20 minutes of sight gags and whimsical audience interaction, before things take a stranger turn. A Tommy Cooper-ish spoof magic trick – a very funny one – somehow devolves into a harrowing performance-art stunt, as over the next hour or more Quinn very slowly eats four very large blocks of cheese.
Why? For God’s sake, why? The heckles – of which there are many – mostly concern his health. Quinn has a genuine gift for dealing with hecklers, which would set him up well if he chose to use his talents for stand-up, rather than for this bizarre, attritional ordeal. There are, inevitably, lulls, but I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a great many laughs, too. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, but when I finally staggered out into the street at 3.15am, I was left full of joie de vivre. I’m not sure I’d recommend it, per se, but I’m glad it exists. TFS
Tickets: free, unticketed. Details: freefringe.org.uk
Ed Night: The Plunge ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)
When: 7.35pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 14)
In a nutshell: It’s a joy to have Ed Night back – which is a surprise, as I’d never previously thought of him as joyful. Night was the Angry Young Man of the 2018 Fringe, making his name with a dark, edgy show that called out Russell Brand as a wrong’un, declaring loudly what others at the time were only whispering.
He’s always been a thoughtful writer, but for this welcome comeback he’s used that formidable intelligence to see how many dumb jokes it’s possible to cram into an hour. “There are 240 punchlines in this show,” he says. If anything, that’s an under-estimate – and at least a hundred of them had me roaring.
He touches on painful topics – side-effects of his antidepressants, a cancer scare – but with zero self-pity; it’s all just grist to the gag-mill, in between thoughts on eating Lego, obsessing over waterfowl, and adopting an emotional-support ant. “I’ll sell that one to Milton Jones,” he says, after a particularly surreal one-liner.
There are a few glimpses of the old provocateur – there’s a bracing routine on how therapy-speak has been appropriated by “ephebophiles”, leading to an unsettling sight-gag later – but for the most part this is a remarkably feel-good hour.
The more poetic lines (“time carved alcoves out of my experience, and left statues there”) come sandwiched between routines that are knowingly cheesy – yet just as knowingly well-crafted. He even wrings something new out of that hoary old stand-up chestnut, the supermarket till. (“Self-checkout material – isn’t that a bit hack?” he says afterwards, heckling himself, then grins. “Was Van Gogh the first person to paint a flower?”)
Night’s change of style might be down to his recent change of career, moving away from live stand-up to become an online “content creator” (a phrase he admits has the same unappealing ring as “refuse collector” or “sex worker”). But he really belongs on stage. He’s in The Hive – the free Fringe’s worst-smelling venue – and owns it like it’s the Palladium. Even when both the room’s microphones broke, he handled the tech upset like a pro.
There’s no overarching theme here, no grand manifesto, just a pay-what-you-want hour of belly-laughs – and that’s more than enough. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
John Luke Roberts: A World Just Like Our Own, But… ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 4)
When: 2.10pm
Until: Aug 10 & 23 only (in rep with other shows by John Luke Roberts)
In a nutshell: There’s a world where Morrissey followed Meat is Murder with the less successful Salt and Vinegar Crisps Are Embezzlement; in another world, Evil Knievel is called Morally-Ambivalent Knorrelly-Ambivalent.
John-Luke Roberts knows about all these worlds, and many more, because he’s opened a portal to parallel dimensions in his tumble-dryer – and brought along the machine (and the one-liners) to prove it. I’ll forgive him for frequently checking his notes – with hundreds of gags all starting with exactly the same set-up, this show must be a nightmare to remember.
In recent years, Roberts has produced some of the cleverest and most inventive shows on the Fringe. Blending pure idiocy, poignant musings on failed relationships and quips about quantum physics, his latest stand-up hour is another high-concept treat. TFS
[Reviewed at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. John-Luke Roberts is reviving his last 10 Edinburgh Shows, on alternate days, as John-Luke Roberts: John-Luke-a-Palooza, until Aug 25. Details: impatientproductionsuk.com]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson ★★★★☆
Where: Assembly George Square Studios (Studio Three)
When: 10.55pm
Until: Aug 8-12 only
In a nutshell: This smart, slippery concoction is not at all what it initially claims to be. Affably greeting us each with a warm “Hello!” as we file in, Asian-American Fringe newcomer Chris Grace (“Chinese, gay, and fat – what are the chances?”) introduces it as a tribute to his favourite actress, Scarlett Johansson; cue a row of glam wigs across the back of the stage, in readiness. Before long, however, the fraught matter of her playing a necessarily Japanese character in the 2017 blockbuster Ghost in the Shell comes up, while Grace’s repeated insistence that “This is not a hit piece” acquires the acidulous insincerity of Mark Antony’s refrain “And Brutus is an honourable man...”.
For the show is, in fact, an impassioned but always entertaining takedown of racial pre-conception and “whitewashing”, one that also, in terms of structure, starts to fold in on itself like a particularly contorted Möbius strip, even collapsing at one point in an avalanche of absurdist verbiage. In short, an unusual combination of genuine surprises, sharp wit and food for thought. MM
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Rosalie Minnitt: Clementine ★★★★☆
Where: Underbelly Cowgate (Iron Belly)
When: 6.40pm
Until: Aug 21
In a nutshell: Belgian, I’m told, though as plummily English-sounding as it is possible to be, Rosalie Minnitt is not the first young character comedian to serve up a cod-Austenesque period romp at the Fringe, but she may well be the most energetic. This show – at heart, a single-hander play, but with with lots of good-natured audience interaction to lift it closer to the realms of stand-up – sees the Fringe debutante deliver, at breakneck speed, and rather in the manner of a brattish, precociously articulate eight-year-old, the picaresque tale of the titular Lady Clementine and her giddy quest to find true love by her 27th birthday.
She packs the show with tart jokes and knowing anachronisms (such as a nice little dig at the Arts Council), and, beneath its riotous exterior, is making plenty of salient points here about male and female romantic assumptions and expectations. But it’s her absolutely barnstorming performance and complete mastery of her material that really sweep the whole thing along. By the end, you wonder what more this dynamo could possibly have done in the pursuit of showing her audience a good time, and can only applaud her for it. MM
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: edfringe.com
John Robertson’s The Dark Room ★★★★☆
Where: Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Doonstairs)
When: 10pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: Remember 1980s text-based adventures? The unforgiving likes of Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Game? You’d type “Go north” or “Fight troll” into your computer, and hope not to die. No? Well, no worries: you needn’t have played one to enjoy this deranged spoof.
One at a time, audience volunteers are pitted against the Pythonesque illogic of John Robertson’s multiple-choice escape-room game, hoping to win £1000, or a range of lesser prizes. (On press night, these trophies included a pineapple and a baffled guest comedian, Lorna Rose Treen). It’s very funny, very odd, and very, very loud.
I first saw The Dark Room in a Free Fringe basement more than a decade ago. Since then it’s toured the world, becoming a genuine cult sensation, with die-hard followers; it’s a Rocky Horror Show for nerds. I was hesitant about revisiting it. After years of the same shtick, would Robertson just be going through the motions?
The answer, thankfully, is no. As the evil gamesmaster, he’s a force of nature. Dressed in the leather and spikes of a Mad Max villain, roaring like the son of Brian Blessed and Nick Helm, he stalks the stage in near-darkness while shining a torch into his wild-eyed face. Robertson has a real flair for crowd work. He throws around foul-mouthed putdowns like confetti. He risks life and limb by climbing some 15 feet of crowd-barrier, just to insult a punter from close-range. As just one sample, here’s his warm greeting to any Gen-Z’ers in the audience: “Understand this, pr---s! I have personal problems older than you! I have tamagotchis older than you, and I like them BETTER! And they’re DEAD!” Reader, I howled. This is definitely not a children’s show, but Robertson is, alarmingly, doing a family-friendly spin-off at 5.30pm each day for brave tots. Lord help them. TFS
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: 0131 622 6552; gildedballoon.co.uk
Stamptown Comedy Night ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Grand)
When: 11.30pm
Until: Aug 15-17 & 22-24 only
In a nutshell: Stamptown (the company behind some of the best shows at this year’s Fringe) hosts a mixed-bill show that feels less like a comedy night than a party; the kind of party you wake up from three days later, in another country, handcuffed to a lamppost. Expect to see half-a-dozen outlandish clown, burlesque and circus acts, all interrupted by a gang of bubble-blowing loons in purple morph suits, on roller-blades.
The night I went featured a stomach-churning bouffon routine from Natalie Palamides, and a set from showbiz’s most unlikely triple-threat Sikisa (a stand-up, professional immigration lawyer, and international burlesque star). Zach Zucker – usually half of the double act Zach & Viggo, alongside this year’s Britain’s Got Talent winner – hosts in character as his washed-up American comedian alter-ego “Jack Tucker”. Always on the brink of a breakdown, and at war with an overzealous tech guy blasting naff sound-effects from the tech booth, he creates an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos. If you’re only in town for one night, this is the late-night cabaret to see. TFS
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Kieran Hodgson: Big in Scotland ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Forth), plus extra show at Pleasance Courtyard (Beyond), 6.30pm on Aug 25
When: 5.30pm on Aug 17 & 8.30pm on Aug 21
Until: Aug 17, 21 & 25 only
In a nutshell: In 2023, The Telegraph ranked Kieran Hodgson one of the funniest comedians of this century. Reading that list, anyone who missed the terrific trilogy of shows he staged from 2015-18 might well have muttered “Kieran who?” (even if he’s lately found a morsel of mainstream fame, thanks to his viral lockdown videos and a sitcom role in Two Doors Down).
But now he’s back on stage, doing what he does best, with another cleverly structured show weaving his love of geeky trivia and gift for voices into a slick, sweet hour of autobiographical storytelling, peppered with impressions of politicians (his Gordon Brown is dead-on) and half-forgotten celebrities (music hall star Harry Lauder, anyone?).
For his sitcom job, Hodgson upped sticks from London “tae Glasgae”, and Big in Scotland is his mischievous, ribbing love-letter to his adopted home. He initially balked at leaving the capital (“No way was I moving to Scotland! I was destined for greater things!”) until a personal epiphany, when a friend pointed out that he could be a bit of an unlikeable Clever Dick. Why not use this move as a chance to ditch “English Kieran”, and reinvent his personality? He would become more Scottish than the Scots, and the simple folk of that wee, dreich, drab country would surely be grateful to have him on their side. Or so he thought.
Hodgson pulls off a very clever balancing-act here, alternately puncturing and playing into his slight air of smugness. He re-enacts awkward conversations (real or invented) between his slightly pompous past self and various Scots who put him in his place, whether he’s patronising them over local politics or demanding vegan haggis in a rural pub.
He brings his interlocutors to life with meticulous regional accents, from Edinburgh to North Uist – but also gives us his own earlier self’s hilariously clumsy attempt at a generic Scottish brogue. We follow his journey, as he tries on different versions of himself – and different ideas about Scotland – before rejecting each in turn. Scotland, he realises, is too various, thrawn and contradictory to fit any generalisation about it – a moral that plays well to the enthusiastic Edinburgh crowd. This charming show reminded me of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s great line: “Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?” TFS
[Reviewed at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe]
Tickets: pleasance.co.uk
Ahir Shah: Ends ★★★★☆
Where: Pleaseance Courtyard (Pleasance One)
When: 7.30pm
Until: Aug 12-23 only
In a nutshell: Ahir Shah starts tugging heartstrings before he even sets foot on stage. Over the PA in a darkened theatre, as a prologue to this hour, he tells us about watching TV with his family as a small boy. One night in 1998, he heard a sound he’d rarely heard before: his grandparents’ laughter. Watching them howl at the pilot episode of Goodness Gracious Me – the first time they’d seen British Asians being funny on screen – he decided that night to become a comedian.
That decision worked out pretty well: Shah won the world’s most prestigious live comedy award, by accident. His director Adam Brace had died suddenly in April 2023 with this show still half-finished. So Ends arrived at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe as a work-in-progress, with critics and prize-judges not invited. That memo didn’t reach the Edinburgh Comedy Award panel; sent to Ends by mistake, they loved it and gave it the trophy.
Personally, I’d happily have awarded Shah that prize five years ago. Having started stand-up while still a schoolboy at a rough-round-the-edges comprehensive, and later performed with the Footlights at Cambridge (leaving him “functionally bilingual in both Posh Boy and Roadman”), the thirty-something has long been one of our most eloquent, thought-provoking comic voices.
There are comic detours about Ottolenghi cookbooks and money-saving expert Martin Lewis, and the unlikely tale of how Latin lessons saved him from a mugging, but the backbone of this beautifully told show uses Shah’s family’s story as the story of multicultural Britain in miniature.
Reflecting on his grandfather’s stints in the most English workplaces imaginable (at a baked-beans factory, on a double-decker bus) he asks profound questions about generational sacrifice, and what it means to work to make your children’s lives a little better than our own. By the end, I was wiping away tears.
Political comedy can often fall back on an everything-is-awful stance; ranting is both easy and funny, while nuance is neither. Yet in this defiantly hopeful show, Shah takes a longer view. To his late grandfather – who arrived in Britain from India in 1964 – the UK of the 2020s, and the very idea of a British-Indian Prime Minister, would seem “an unimaginable utopia of progress”. In Shah’s household, news of Sunak’s appointment was instantly followed by ribbing from his competitive parents: “Have you seen what Mr Sunak’s son has done today? Still, you enjoy Mocking your Week.”
Ends may not be this fast-talking philosopher-comic’s funniest show to date, nor his most dazzlingly clever, but it is his most assured and likeable, thanks to the seemingly effortless way it weaves together the personal and the political into a big-hearted, uplifting whole. TFS
[Reviewed at the Soho Theatre, London]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Lara Ricote: Little Tiny Wet Show (Baptism) ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 3)
When: 4.15pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 12, 19)
In a nutshell: The stage is strewn with cardboard tombstones. Among them walks Lara Ricote – less Tomb Raider, more oddball priestess – before wafting through the crowd in a white christening gown. Any audience lives only for one night, she explains; in this show, we will be baptised with a new name, build an intimate relationship with the mischievous young stand-up, and be snuffed out an hour later.
It’s a cute conceit: the goofy Mexican comic uses the performer-audience bond as a stand-in for romance, tying together an hour of sweet and salty observational comedy about the ups and downs of a longterm relationship. We’re encouraged to call out vowels and consonants, Countdown-style, to generate a shared name (on press night, “Kofut Duba”), which provides a consistently funny running joke. “I like you, Kofut,” she grins.
Ricote is one of the fastest-rising stars on the scene, popping up on QI and Live at the Apollo since the summer of 2022, when she was crowned the Edinburgh Fringe’s Best Newcomer (the award that launched the careers of Harry Hill and Tim Minchin).
Nobody sounds quite like Ricote, which is partly due to her writing – raised in Mexico but based in Amsterdam, she seems to have escaped all the clichés of bog-standard British observational stand-up – and partly due to her actual voice. A high, cartoonish lisp one moment, an animal growl the next, its unusual timbre is a natural comic asset, brilliantly deployed. “I sound like this offstage, too,” she jokes. “I’m hard of hearing but that has nothing to do with the voice, unfortunately. That’s just a kiss on the forehead from God himself.”
Ricote has degenerative hearing loss, while her partner, Fernando, has no sense of smell. As you’d imagine, she gets no end of material from this: “We’re like each other’s service dogs.” Having a boyfriend who can’t smell has its upsides, an idea she illustrates with an acted-out mime of an unnoticed fart, sashaying into a room like a catwalk model. (Ricote has a flair for silly, full-body physical comedy.)
There’s a Seinfeldish simplicity to the stronger routines here, whether she’s pleading ignorance about such ideas as “communicating” and “being supportive” – she’s new to relationships, how could she possibly have known – or splitting the audience in two, and judging both halves on their reactions: “Half of you came here, and the other half were brought – and I can tell.”
The show that won Ricote her Best Newcomer trophy was thrilling but scattershot, a ragbag of ideas. This follow-up, directed by fellow Gen-Z comedy wunderkind Leo Reich, is more streamlined, more theatrical. At times, it feels too neatly put together, as when a silly opening musical number (a mangled rendition of Let It Be) gets an inevitable reprise at the end, or when a prop-based joke self-consciously punctures a moment of seriousness. But if it’s not quite as packed with quotable gags, it still feels like a step in the right direction from a comedian destined for great things. TFS
[Reviewed at the Soho Theatre, London]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Jazz Emu: Knight Fever ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Pleasance One)
When: 9pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 12)
In a nutshell: “My utter lack of ego is godlike,” croons Jazz Emu – voice of an angel, mind of an idiot – as he barges past his four-piece backing band to elbow his way into the spotlight. For a deliciously silly hour, we are transported to the Royal Albert Hall – or, at least, its cramped and seedy basement. For this is where the world’s pre-eminent jazz-funk-pop star is preparing for his set at the Royal Variety Performance. There’s no room upstairs: Kelly Clarkson, his nemesis, has pinched the stage for her soundcheck. The stakes are high: can he impress the King, and thus beat Clarkson to the knighthood? (In this surreal universe, there’s only ever one knighthood up for grabs; if it doesn’t go to him, the alternative is Sir Kelly.)
If there is a better musical comedy act in the country right now, I’ll eat my disco ball. Dreamt up by young ex-Footlight Archie Henderson, Jazz Emu is a marvellous comic creation – a monster of vanity and hubris, insecurity bubbling under the surface. Every detail serves the louche, retro-naff aesthetic, from his appalling flared trousers, to his sub-Jarvis Cocker dance moves, to his unplaceable accent (a Eurovision announcer’s Scandi-RP).
The real joke is the musicianship, which is superb. These tunes are far better than they have any need to be, and wildly mismatched to their tongue-twistingly unhip lyrics (one song, for instance, sets a spam email to music). If there is a better musical comedy act in the country right now, I’ll eat my disco ball. Dreamt up by young ex-Footlight Archie Henderson, Jazz Emu is a marvellous comic creation – a monster of vanity and hubris, insecurity bubbling under the surface.
His meticulously polished 2022 solo show was a revelation. If this follow-up falls a whisker short of matching it – here, the knighthood framing device feels more thrown-together than the previous show’s bonkers plotline – what it lacks in precision it makes up for in party atmosphere. TFS
[Reviewed at the Soho Theatre, London]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Mhairi Black: Politics Isn’t for Me ★★★☆☆
Where: Gilded Balloon at the Museum (Auditorium)
When: 1.15pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 12-13)
In a nutshell: Her agent must have been miffed. In June, a newspaper ran an interview with Mhairi Black to ask what one of the UK’s youngest-ever MPs planned to do after leaving parliament. The article ran to thousands of words, but forgot to answer the question: she’s trying stand-up.
Mere months ago Black was the SNP’s deputy leader. Now she’s in an Edinburgh Fringe lunchtime slot at the Gilded Balloon with Politics Isn’t for Me, a show sandwiched between a magician and something called “Primary School Assembly Bangers Live!”.
If Black forgot to plug her show – a rookie error, as any novice comedian will tell you – it turns out she didn’t need the additional publicity. The month’s run is already sold out, and on the first Friday of the Fringe she was greeted with protracted applause as soon as she appeared onstage.
Although the blurb promises “brutally honest” revelations, this solid hour’s focus is the humdrum slog of being an MP, sitting in the Commons for seven or eight hours at a time, barred from getting up even to use the bathroom. “Everybody pocket-munches,” she explains, giving a memorable impression of Ian Paisley Jr leaning over to ask her: “Do you wanna sweetie?”
Surprisingly, there’s little anger here. Score-settling is kept till the very end – she names and shames two MPs who criticised her while she was on sick-leave. Her fiercest critique is reserved for Westminster itself, from the archaic lobby-voting system to the building’s physical decline.
The show’s entertaining middle section feels like a guided tour from a mischievous janitor: mind the broken window, look out for the loose flooring. As she rightly points out, “if it was any other building, health and safety would shut it in a heartbeat”. Here are the buckets, catching drops from the leaking roof. Here’s the cafeteria, its floor peppered with mouse-droppings. (We’re treated to photos).Oh, and here’s the lobby bathroom where Black hid to delay a vote on Gaza, ending up locked in a toilet cubicle with a Conservative MP who’d had the same idea.
Comedy shows lacking actual comedy are often disparaged as mere Ted Talks. But this “Ned talk” swerves that criticism by remembering to keep up a consistent gag-count, delivered with the confidence familiar from her time in the Commons. Anyone already favourably disposed to Black can add a star to the rating above; anyone who can’t stand her should dock one. But the merely curious, hoping for an hour’s educational entertainment, won’t leave disappointed. Black may end up back in Westminster one day, but as a comedy critic, I’d rather see her aiming for a less dingy venue, with fewer drunken hecklers. Perhaps the Frog and Bucket. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Anna Akana: It Gets Darker ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Upstairs)
When: 5.30pm
Until: Aug 24 (not 12, 19)
In a nutshell: Anna Akana has enough extraordinary stories to fill six or seven Fringe shows. Packing them all into this debut, however, makes for an hour that feels like it’s only just skimming the surface of any of them.
One theme running through It Gets Darker is the pressures facing Asian-American families in general, and her own grief-stricken family in particular. The actress and comedian’s teenage sister killed herself in a year when adolescent suicide was so prevalent in the US that there was a nationwide shortage of child-sized coffins. Meanwhile, her short-sighted, retirement-age father one day announced to the family that he was leaving to fight for Ukraine – then skipped, giggling, out of the room, before going off to do just that.
She also touches on her mental health conditions, which include Exploding Head Syndrome – a real thing, astonishingly – and intrusive suicidal thoughts (she nicknames the voice in her head “Hitler”, which makes resisting his advice easier). But the most jaw-dropping anecdote involves a deranged stalker, who sent her death-threats before turning up at her house. In a characteristically dark gag, Akana finds a silver lining to that ordeal – it helped with her depression, as “nothing cures your suicidal ideation faster than somebody wanting to do it for you.”
Akana is best known for making YouTube videos about mental health – a sideline which has evidently shaped her stand-up style; reassuringly confident, yet stuck in a calming mid-gear, a little lacking in variety and spontaneity.
Always compelling but rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the show somehow adds up to less than the sum of its remarkable parts. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Chelsea Birkby: This Is Life, Cheeky Cheeky ★★★☆☆
Where: Just the Tonic at the Caves (Just Out of the Box)
When: 9.20pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: The Cheeky Girls - the twins who, 21 years ago, sang “touch my bum, this is life” - have not hitherto been considered great philosophers. That might change after this show, Chelsea Birkby’s beguiling follow-up to her 2022 debut, which charts unlikely connections between Camus, the Kardashians and DH Lawrence.
The conceit is that the young comedian, who has bipolar disorder, was ordered by her therapist to reconnect with her body. Bookworm that she is, she attempted to do this by simply reading a bunch of books on the topic; her gleanings from them give the hour its main arc, but also pull it a little too far in the direction of therapeutic earnestness, when Birkby’s real talent is for crafting gags.
It’s a gently amusing hour that mainly coasts along on charm, but offers charm by the bucketload. Birkby has a delightful onstage manner, giddily dorky, with a sweetness that adds piquancy to her rare forays into edgier material, particularly in an uncharacteristically dark routine about euthanasia and Brazilian “butt lift” surgery, which lays the groundwork for a hilarious callback much later. Just what the doctor ordered. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
Finlay Christie: I Deserve This ★★★☆☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 4)
When: 10.40pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 13)
In a nutshell: When so many comedians seem to want your sympathy, it’s refreshing to meet one who doesn’t. The wickedly subversive idea that gives Finlay Christie’s second solo hour its structure is a 10-point guide to earning social caché in the Gen Z identity-politics stakes, even if you’ve had the bad luck to be born a wealthy white man. Steps include political activism (“If you don’t have your own struggle, just use someone else’s”) and declaring yourself “neurodiverse”. He has a characteristically sharp zinger about discovering his own mental health label: “Turns out I’m a narcissist - couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
In 2019, Christie became the youngest ever winner of the prestigious So You Think You’re Funny award, aged 19, and still plays up to his youthful image. This show’s very funny opening routine (recycled from his 2023 special OK Zoomer) is a delicious bit of wordplay about why he’s glad to be only a boy, rather than a man.
He has one foot still in his schooldays; we’re treated, if that’s the word, to the cringeworthy rap recordings he made with his posh school-friends. (A slightly tiresome bit; presenting your embarrassing teenage creative project for derision is rapidly becoming an overused stand-up trope.)
Directed by Bobby Mair, this hour seems influenced for the better by Mair’s own likeably unlikeable stand-up. Christie’s cheeky-chappie “who, me?” delivery allows him to skim through dark waters unscathed; potential disapproval simply slides off him like water off a duck’s back. At times, he manages to be both provocative and genuinely surprising (as in a risky routine about sleeping with a trans woman out of social pressure). At other times, though (as in a riff on Scandavian stereotypes, or when he’s summarising Britain as “colonialism and paedos”), buttons are pushed in a way that feels a little perfunctory, teetering into cliché. Still, it’s a bracing, mischievous hour from a comic whose charisma is undeniable. TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
The Ceremony ★★★☆☆
Where: Summerhall (Former Womens Locker Room)
When: 9.45pm
Until: Aug 26 (not 12, 19)
In a nutshell: Most improv shows are hardly improv; they follow a fixed formula, and serve up variations on the same games each night. Ben Volchok’s The Ceremony is a noble exception. Flying entirely by the seat of his pants, the Australian might try a wordless hour of physical comedy one day, and the next day create a quasi-religious Ted Talk cobbled together from following random hyperlinks on an onstage laptop. The only common thread is the idea that the show must, in some way, become a ritual or ceremony.
When I saw him, there were some excellent segues; the idea of seeking “change” turned into a whip-around for the crowd’s loose cash, which led into an extended analysis of one man’s wallet. Volchok’s leisurely, sedate delivery - hiding the frantic effort beneath the surface, like a swan paddling - helps buy him time to think his way out of any dead-end. When it works, the connects he creates are delightful. But the kind of games he plays with pacing and the crowd’s attention span require perfect control of the audience to pull off; when I saw him that control was lacking, and there were simply too many lulls between the laughs. Still, when each show is a great leap without a safety net, you have to admire the attempt. TFS
[Reviewed at The Museum of Comedy, London]
Tickets: edfringe.com
Dylan Mulvaney: Faghag ★★★☆☆
Where: Assembly George Square Studios
When: 9.40pm
Until: Aug 25
In a nutshell: Of all the culture-war stories to have come out of America in recent years, the oddest might be last summer’s Bud Light fiasco. Budweiser sent free beer to minor celebrities – including a novelty can for a young influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, who posted about it on her Instagram page, where one might have imagined it would be seen only by her followers.
You’d expect any backlash to have come from Mulvaney’s fans, duped into drinking that godawful dishwater. This is not what happened. Instead, as Mulvaney is transgender, her video prompted worldwide headlines and a boycott. Budweiser factories faced bomb threats. Pop singer Kid Rock filmed himself firing a gun at their beer. The years leading up to that debacle – and what came after – are the subject of Faghag, Mulvaney’s entertaining and highly polished Edinburgh Fringe debut.
In a prologue, we meet Mulvaney in angel wings – a ditzy, clueless soul in heaven awaiting re-incarnation. Born into a boy’s body, she’s aware from the outset there’s been a mistake. (A droll running joke imagines her being prescribed a pill called “Twink” to appease her mother, who finds the idea of a gay son easier to swallow than a transgender daughter).
Mulvaney’s a committed performer, who throws everything into the show – embracing the crowd, hugging fans and posing for selfies before the hour starts. But for all her charisma, Faghag is easier to admire than love.
Some threads felt under-explored: I’d have liked to know more about her conflicted Catholicism – jokily shrugged off, for the most part, but addressed in a brief moment of sincerity. “In the early days of transition,” she says, “I’d never felt so close to God.”
With its lavish all-pink Barbie Dreamhouse set, it’s a remarkably high-budget production by Fringe standards. The programme lists a team of around 50 people, including voice-over cameos from the likes of Simon Callow and Alan Cumming. Three credited songwriters (including Grammy-winner Abigail Barlow) between them offer only three or four songs, none especially memorable, the first arriving so late into the show it’s jokingly treated as a plot twist.
The first half whizzes through her childhood – Catholic schooldays, a spat with her mother (a funny skit imagines this as a WWE grudge match), first awkward romance, etc – but the show really finds its satirical teeth when it reaches her abrupt rise to fame after she began posting content about her transition, and the weird commodification of trans people in the 2020s.
Mulvaney imagines herself stumbling into a chat show – “wait, am I the guest?” – where she’s declared “the new face of trans palatability”, and drowned in brand-ambassador deals. She’s even asked to interview Joe Biden. Ever the ingénue, she agrees: “I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but I’d feel weird saying no.”
A creepy TV host (also Mulvaney; she appears via video-screen as half a dozen supporting characters) gushes that “all the hottest celebrity women are trading in their twinks for a slightly edgier companion.” Those celebrity “friends”, of course, drop her following the first whiff of controversy.
Being a well-known trans person online, Faghag suggests, involves weaving a course between Scylla and Charybdis: angry trolls to the Right, virtue-signalling corporations looking for a fashionable mascot to the left. Mulvaney’s conclusion – attributing her rise-then-fall to “late-stage capitalism and misogyny” – is largely true, but like much in this breezy, glossy show, it also feels a little too neat. TFS
Tickets: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Spring Day: Exvangelical ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Beside)
When: 6.05pm
Dates: Aug 3-25 (not 13)
“I joined a Christian cult when I was 13 and escaped when I was 26… this is my story”, announces Spring Day, a drawling, beaming survivor of an American upbringing that has left battle-scars alongside an ability to see the funny side. The odd thing about Day’s hour is that when she’s being level about her life-story, it’s interesting, eye-opening and entertaining stuff – especially the rural midwestern childhood which saw her contend with cerebral palsy and befriend the VCR while her parents toiled, and tried, and failed, to work out their own issues: “By the time I was 13, my mum had hit me so much it’s a miracle I’m not doing burlesque”.
Church was seized on as her salvation but gave her the usual hang-ups about sex and eternal damnation and the higher she climbed towards goodness the more apparent the shortcomings of her fellow Bible-bashers became. You almost want more painterly detail on all of this – when Day reaches for knock-out gags, with a disproportionately hefty delivery, the punchline too often lands wide.
But it’s no easy task to hold a room, her warmth isn’t in doubt and if she moves into sermon mode that’s understandable. “I just wanted to belong to a family that had the capacity to give a shit about me,” she realised; that it took her so long to glean something so obvious speaks volumes. And perhaps explains too why there’s a hell of a lot of mad-eyed religion to be found both Stateside and worldwide. DC
Tickets: edfringe.com
Andrew Doherty: Gay Witch Sex Cult ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Attic)
When: 11pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 12)
In a nutshell: Camp-as-Christmas estate agent and father-to-be Kaelan Trough has gathered his nearest and dearest (that’s us) for a gender-reveal party. Neither the child nor Kaelan’s husband Jeremy has arrived yet, so to kill time Kaelan begins telling the story of how he fell in love – and his brush with a centuries-old demonic cult on a remote island.
Horror-comedy is a tricky genre to pull off, but this well-written slice of Wicker Man-flavoured farce from Andrew Doherty (of the sketch troupe Megan from HR) serves up both sides of the equation with aplomb, contriving a couple of genuine jump-scares in between the laughs.
The show takes a little while to find its feet, as does Doherty’s performance. Squawking, narcissistic Kaelan is a grating narrator at first – a one-note creation who really needs a comic foil to avoid becoming monotonous. Things pick up considerably once a flashback introduces us to the cursed island and its eerie denizens (allowing Doherty to slip into different roles, including a hilarious back-and-forth with a gruff boatman); as events take a darker turn, we even begin to warm to Kaelan, unloveable idiot though he might be.
Gay Witch Sex Cult isn’t a perfect show, but it’s clever, impish fun, and Doherty is clearly a talent to watch. At the very least, it’s easily the best Fringe show about a gay witch sex cult since, well, the last one (the 2023 debut from Lachlan Werner – who is, incidentally back at the Fringe with a new work-in-progress). TFS
Tickets: edfringe.com
