![Olga Koch: Prawn Cocktail is touring Europe until Oct 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000346488401_16929569961180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqY4q9QngjCiUfzIOs9KVm12LY9F3-voPj9q7hfvhHJuk.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Edinburgh comedy reviews: the funniest shows at the 2023 Fringe
Our comedy critics review 56 of the funniest stand-up and sketch shows in Edinburgh, from Olga Koch to Troll
![Olga Koch: Prawn Cocktail is touring Europe until Oct 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000346488401_16929569961180_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqY4q9QngjCiUfzIOs9KVm12LY9F3-voPj9q7hfvhHJuk.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Olga Koch: Prawn Cocktail ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 1)
When: 7.35pm
Until: Aug 21 (then touring Europe until Oct 27)
In a nutshell: Olga Koch’s superpower has always been her bulletproof confidence: she’s bold, bawdy, and utterly unembarrassable. But Prawn Cocktail – her most impressive show since her Best Newcomer-nominated 2018 debut, and her funniest to date – reveals a few cracks in that confident exterior, and is all the more interesting for it.
Since her last show, she jokes, she’s become “the first woman in history to turn 30”. Her wickedly funny recap of her past year’s libertinage is a good advert for questionable choices. She’s taken up smoking cigars, had a threesome, got her first three tattoos (“and they mean absolutely nothing!”), completed a postgrad thesis, and – she tells us, beaming – contracted both salmonella and HPV, proving “you CAN have it all!”
To cap it all off, she booked a holiday-of-a-lifetime to Japan with a chap she’d met only once. Was it a bad decision? Had she invested too much in the idea of this near-stranger? Does she really believe her own mantra that “regrets aren’t real”? Those questions – and the story of that ill-fated trip – dovetail with a thread about her thesis on the “parasocial relationships” we form with people we don’t really know at all.
But those strands aren’t really the point in a set that’s clubby in a good way, a series of rib-tickling cut-out-and-keep routines tightly stitched together. With her clever, polished writing and hyper-charismatic delivery, Koch seems destined for much bigger venues than this one. TFS
Tickets: rocknrolga.com
John Tothill: The Last Living Libertine ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Pleasance Below)
When: 8.30pm
Until: Aug 27
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In a nutshell: Flirting unconvincingly with the crowd in his louche leopard-print shirt, John Tothill wants to pretend he’s a debauched sex-bomb – a role in which this 20-something, clarinet-playing, Catholic primary-school teacher from Southend on Sea is hilariously miscast. Like Simon Amstell, he finds laughs in the gulf between his geeky manner and the wild-living freedom he champions.
This debut is, supposedly, a lecture on the history of pleasure-seeking in Britain. He gets as far as putting the boot into Martin Luther, but is constantly, winkingly distracted from his mission, veering off into routines about the “Hobbesian” wildness of his classroom, the “crypto-fascist” decor of gyms, and a delectable attack on tupperware (“little coffins for food”). If Tothill doesn’t yet seem wholly confident in his stage presence, that’s partly because it’s such an intriguing mix of contrasts: teacherishly mock-stern one moment, camply playful the next. A very promising debut indeed. TFS
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Troll ★★★☆☆
Where: Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Laugh)
When: 5.50pm
Until: Aug 27
![Troll is at Underbelly Cowgate until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000346747735_16929579215170_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqmMet6gJxxKTw9P67GxPywHdR78eTBj0hwdfFRfV9oOU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: A lecture on the persecution of mythical trolls, delivered by the trolls themselves, in Norwegian. If that idea doesn’t appeal, I’m sincerely sorry for you. Our guides here are two very charming clowns - Marie Kallevik Straume and Anna Marie Simonsen - in green bodystockings and long plastic noses, with ginger wigs to match their furry tails. They sniff and befriend the crowd, play-act a revisionist version of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and try to figure out how folding chairs work (entangling a hapless volunteer). Some of the clowning techniques feel a little by-the-book, following the Lecoq/Gaulier school of hesitant, deadpan audience interaction, and the late swerve into English for a closing Q&A and musical number somewhat dents the fantasy world they’ve created. Still, I’d take these trolls over their less-kindhearted internet namesakes any day. Troll is not advertised as a children’s show, but from the enraptured look on the faces of two very young punters in the front row, I reckon it’s just as much fun for small trollets. A truly (troll-ly?) delightful afternoon of escapist whimsy. TFS
Bill O’Neill: The Amazing Banana Brothers ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Beside)
When: 10pm
Until: Aug 27
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In a nutshell: Come see the great Kevin Calamity, bull-whip-crackin’, eyepatch-wearin’ circus star! Watch in wonder as he slips on 1,000 banana skins an hour! (Each one painstakingly hand-peeled by his nervous sidekick and younger brother, Joey Insanity.)
The drunken, swearing, swaggering Kevin (O’Neill) is already berating the crowd as the first audience-members file in. Moments later, he’s apparently relieving himself on the unlucky front row. An hour in the company of this alpha-doofus would be too much to handle; fortunately, we don’t have to. A ghoulish twist 10 minutes into this hour leaves him indisposed, with poor Joey (also O’Neill, via a quick costume change) stuck desperately trying to keep the show on the road.
If I were a gambling man, I’d put money on the young LA-based comic O’Neill to scoop the Fringe’s Best Newcomer award with this one-man double-act, less for its world-building imagination than for the sheer box-ticking range of talents on show: we get character comedy, song, slapstick, and even (in the much-trailed “prestige” banana-slip) a bit of stage-magic. I found the whole easier to admire than love, but there’s more than enough to admire. It’s sharply directed by the queen of anarchic clownery, Natalie Palamides; anyone who’s seen her outrageous Netflix hit Nate will recognise her mucky fingerprints all over its blend of darkness and whimsy, of gross-out daring and unlikely pathos. TFS
Jerry Sadowitz proudly presents... Last Year’s Show! ★★★★☆
Where: The Queen’s Hall
When: 8.30pm
Until: Aug 25
![Jerry Sadowitz is at the Queen's Hall until Aug 25](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000316438613_16929572182250_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNvLtDx75wZSR0MSb26ou_2Okz75bEWdW3CpTA5dFee4.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: A year on from being cancelled by major festival producer Pleasance at the Edinburgh Fringe, Jerry Sadowitz returns to the Scottish capital to re-establish his status as the most caustic, and most compelling, ironist in British comedy. It is now clear that last year’s (to my mind, entirely unmerited) cancellation was prompted by complaints from a very small number of people who can’t tell the difference between feeling offended and being “unsafe”.
Needless to say, the Scottish comedian’s famous stage character (the UK’s most foul-mouthed and hilariously unguarded contrarian) has a few unpublishable words to say about the rhetoric of “safe spaces”. Erratic (to put it mildly) though the opinions of Sadowitz’s alter-ego are, it’s hard to disagree with his derision for the idea that “safe spaces” can be violated by some toxic opinions expressed (or a fake penis exposed) by a comedian.
Like every other performance by Sadowitz, this show poses the question again and again: in a world full of deeply entrenched social, political and ecological problems, should society really be obsessing over a comedian who seeks to invade the comfort zones of everyone (from the most conservative to the most liberal)?
It’s the same question that was posed back in the 1960s by the path-breaking American comedian Lenny Bruce (who was prosecuted for “obscenity” in 1964). The American comic (who was Jewish) shocked audiences (and local prosecutors) with material that included antisemitic epithets.
Sadowitz (who, significantly, is also Jewish) also has an established line in Judeophobic humour. However, you would have to be pretty dense not to realise that he is satirically deriding antisemitism when he apparently endorses the idea of a Jewish cabal that runs the world. That same cabal sunk the Titanic, he says: the great ship was brought down, not by an iceberg, but by a Goldberg.
Sadowitz’s expletive-laden diatribes against literally everyone, from Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Corbyn to young people, old people, women, men, trans and non-binary people, and his fulsome praise for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, are balanced, in a perfectly structured 90-minute show, against the comedian’s renowned talent as a magician. He wowed a sold-out Queen’s Hall with, not only his sleight of hand, but also his sleight of elbow, eyeball and even private parts.
As ever with this extraordinary performer, this quickfire, excoriating show is the stage equivalent of a white-knuckle ride. He is, incontestably, as he says himself, “a cross between Jimmy Carr and a stand-up comedian”. MB
Tickets: 0131 226 0000; edfringe.com
Andrew O’Neill: Geburah ★★★★★
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 1)
When: 10.25pm
Until: Aug 28
![Andrew O'Neill is at Monkey Barrel Comedy until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/22/TELEMMGLPICT000346387763_16927187020380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqgr0r6lluEw15bTdt9SP7I0oHXveR0vrIPLlN8fiaNgI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: A heavy-metal-loving child of the ‘70s, Andrew O’Neill has been plugging away on the circuit for two decades, largely under the critical radar. If the anarchist comic didn’t have a quixotic objection to filthy non-anarchist propaganda techniques (posters, PR, remembering to email people about your show before the run starts, etc) Geburah might be the talk of the town. It’s not perfect – if we’re nitpicking, the closing musical number isn’t a patch on the singalong finale to O’Neill’s last effort – but no show at this year’s Fringe has made me laugh harder.
A dizzyingly eclectic set, scattershot in the best sense, it strikes a well-judged balance of two thirds silly nonsense to one third political comedy, in the rise-up-comrades tradition of Alexei Sayle and Mark Thomas. There’s a bit of the old cockney music-hall turn in O’Neill, too – bursting into song for half a sentence, or banging a drum onstage to hammer home the punchlines.
One recurring theme is the housing crisis. You don’t have to agree with O’Neill’s proposed solution (bloody regicide, via occult ritual) to be rightly troubled by the questions raised along the way: should Russian kleptocrats really own so much of London? Is it a good thing that most housing in Edinburgh is bought by people who don’t live in Scotland?
The best routines here are Izzardish flights of surreal fancy; I howled at one about the private feelings of belt loops, and almost fell off my chair during a deconstruction of the TV show Is It Cake. (O’Neill hasn’t seen it, but happily riffs on it at length.)
On a structural level, there’s something deliciously different going on here: reverse callbacks. You know how comedians will tell a joke, then refer back to it later, turning a line from it into a kind of catchphrase? O’Neill does the opposite, barking out punchlines from jokes that haven’t been told yet as bits of free-floating, hilariously meaningless nonsense, so that when the set-up finally arrives it feels like a eureka moment. Superb. TFS
Tickets: 0131 226 0000; edfringe.com
Laser Kiwi: Rise of the Olive ★★★☆☆
Where: Assembly Roxy
When: 7.50pm
Until: Aug 27
![Laser Kiwi: Rise of the Olive is at Assembly Roxy until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/24/TELEMMGLPICT000346390000_16928759590160_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqfzOMAl0Xij9hZ3C3ekNETYBj75DBKCPNxMKpPUzduMI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: New Zealand trio Laser Kiwi bill themselves as “the world’s only surreal sketch circus”, and they may well have a point. See this resolutely olive-themed (well, why ever not?) blend of circus and comedy, and chances are you’ll emerge believing the titular fruit can levitate, talk, hurl itself across a stage on to a waiting cocktail stick, and heaven knows what else. They’re a likeable trio: Zane (an expert juggler, and the ringmaster at a push), Imogen (a highly trained dancer, to judge from her poise, and serving up some impressive aerial work) and Degge (the ensemble’s kook-in-residence), and they even go to far as to hand out a little sheet ahead of the show that not only lists every one of the imminent sketches but marks each one out of 10.
The humour is broad and unthreatening, the sort to induce agreeable chuckles as opposed to helpless side-splitting, and (as that setlist candidly anticipates) some passages are markedly weaker than others; the evening I caught the show, there was also a long sequence of repeated fluffs that, whether accidental or deliberate, felt a bit odd. In the main though, the skills on offer, the pace of the show and its sheer spirit of fun are ungainsayable, and you’ll be glad you went. MM
Tickets: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Crizards: This Means War ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Dome (TenDome)
When: 5.50pm
Until: Aug 27
![Crizards are at the Pleasance Dome until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/22/TELEMMGLPICT000346459912_16927105648910_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqYP-yEHEhjtPCwS59j6sPb1PAFSRU2fbP_NGNfbzcbEA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Crizards are a pair of musically minded young English fellows who introduce themselves – winningly, if very much in the manner of Flight of the Concords – as “Britains’s lowest-energy double-act”. They are back at the Fringe this year with an entirely ridiculous wartime adventure that, like some daft cousin of Sam Mendes’s 1917, traces the quest of “Private Grandad” to deliver a crucial message to his superiors. The duo – Eddy Hare (the “straighter” man of the two, here looking like an irked 1930s bus conductor) and Will Rowland (with something of a cheerful Thurderbirds puppet about him) – spark very nicely indeed off each other, and the songs that punctuate the action often raise a laugh: Beautiful Horsey is typical of the cartoonish mood, and one wildly lost-in-time club track also stands out.
For all the deadpannery, corpsing and apparently casual disregard of the fourth wall, the show has clearly been carefully put together, with threads such as the Rowland’s impossibly persistent Belgian boy and the perils of smoking on the battlefield making repeated, very funny returns. Does every joke find its target as the hour progresses? Not quite. But the strike rate is still high, the show worth hot-footing it to. MM
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Garrett Millerick: Never Had It So Good ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy @ The Tron
When: 4.25pm
Until: Aug 27
![Garrett Millerick is at the Tron until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/22/TELEMMGLPICT000346459686_16927098127410_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqq6GZV2TOCTHAqKdXYOVHJGbWgOafkjRCkN60-0kSgNg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: If you’ve forgotten just how entertaining an angry, potty-mouthed man armed only with a mic can be, Garrett Millerick is the comic for you. This cracking new hour is a kind of masterclass in apoplexy, a fist-raised rile at the Fringe, at himself for being there, at us (“You bunch of little vampires”) for having nothing better to do of an afternoon than sit in a dank basement, on wildly uncomfortable chairs, watching him... and yet it’s also, ultimately, a bleakly cheerful celebration of the whole, ridiculous thing.
Meanwhile, he brings in and expands on his own recent, personal trials in such a way that the show somehow never feels too navel-gazing. (Since last year, he explains, he has lost five stone and generally cleaned up his act. But will the slim him be as funny? Would we have found the late John Candy as funny if he’d been slim?) En passant, there are enjoyable sideswipes at everything and everyone from Star Wars to Kier Starmer to white people doing irritating things to raise money for charity, and, far from lowering the spirits, Millerick’s set sent this critic out into the Edinburgh drizzle feeling really quite exhilarated. MM
Tickets: 0131 226 0000; edfringe.com
Robin Ince: Weapons of Empathy ★★★★☆
Where: Gilded Balloon at the Museum
When: 1.30pm
Until: Aug 27
![Robin Ince is at the Gilded Balloon Until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/22/TELEMMGLPICT000346389993_16927104092380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqxjWgDRLt1iRCAET9FEErkO7aw45EFm_PAEza588WNM0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Robin Ince’s latest show is something you may never before have encountered at the Edinburgh Fringe: an unapologetically affectionate encomium to the written word, and an enchanting one at that. His stage strewn with paperbacks, and coming across like a droll, charmingly over-eager drama teacher, Ince (co-presenter of the BBC radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage with sleb physicist Brian Cox) trips over himself to share his love not only of reading and of the mind-broadening galaxies it opens up, but of books themselves, and those ever-imperilled establishments where we might buy or borrow them.
He delights in the notes we sometimes encounter in them from previous owners or users, in the old tickets and so on that we occasionally find squirrelled away in their pages, in the parallel stories that all of these may tell, while unstuffily encouraging us to scribble in books as much as we see fit, and never to persevere with a tome we aren’t enjoying. Ince’s anecdotes are (like his turn of phrase) delightful – up to and including a marvellously existential rebuttal to a rude child at a literary festival – and the whole thing comes across as a one-stop antidote to the modern, intolerant, screen-enslaved world. MM
Tickets: 0131 622 6552; gildedballoon.co.uk
Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson ★★★★☆
![Chris Grace, at the Assembly George Square until Aug 28](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/21/TELEMMGLPICT000346390008_16926222035630_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqMjPWPHf5q-JhUxIktoXFkn4ihL9D5G77hk2Gx25ScXg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Where: Assembly George Square (Studio 5)
When: 1.40pm
Until: Aug 28
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
Tickets: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Rosalie Minnitt: Clementine ★★★★☆
Where: Underbelly Cowgate (Delhi Belly)
When: 2.25pm
Until: Aug 27
![Rosalie Minnitt, at the Delhi Belly until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/21/TELEMMGLPICT000346389984_16926222801260_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqq6GZV2TOCTHAqKdXYOVHJGbWgOafkjRCkN60-0kSgNg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
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
Tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Janine Harouni: Man’oushe ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath)
When: 6.20pm
Until: Aug 25 (not 21)
![Janine Harouni: Man’oushe is at the Pleasance Courtyard until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/21/TELEMMGLPICT000346379231_16926059044380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqs5Jlw3kQImjWjpuQDHJAvkWy_sGK6oioMu5BzggyGUY.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: The dramatic stakes are raised every passing day that New York-born actress and writer Janine Harouni performs on the fringe – she’s at full-term pregnancy. So, getting here was a trial and a half, bearing up on stage for an hour ripe for a standing ovation, and what happens next presumably the subject of future family and maybe showbiz folklore – “They might win Best Newcomer!” Not that she bangs on about this feminist feat of maternal daring, during an hour that weighs what motherhood can cost in terms of personal ambition.
Swerving anything cutely icky, she gives us a bit of related backstory – her Lebanese roots (her grandmother sang with the singer Fairuz, and – we learn – had to sacrifice the experience of motherhood in a particular way), the low-down on her Irish husband Andrew and how he proposed after she, accidentally on purpose, found the engagement ring. “He said: ‘I guess I should call my parents.’ I said, ‘I already have.’”
There’s a knowingly sick-taste gag about abortion, and some fun jibes about the horror of having an English-accented child, but there’s also a sad revelation about a previous pregnancy waiting in the wings to indicate how much she wants this kid and how much comedy is about staving off anxiety. In the mix too is Harouni’s tribute to the late Adam Brace, her director and friend, and after whom the baby will take one of his names. Here’s to them all. DC
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Gyles Brandreth Can’t Stop Talking! ★★★★★
Where: Assembly George Square (Gordon Aikman Theatre)
When: 4pm
Until: Aug 27
![Gyles Brandreth is at the Gordon Aikman Theatre until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/21/TELEMMGLPICT000344693953_16926050359630_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqnQSfWb85vljghMlIYmeE7QDiQB0ks0OTe8ztTf-odhA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: How is it that 75-year-old former MP Gyles Brandreth has the energy of a whipper-snapper fresh out of university? His new show does what it says on the tin, and delivers a continual round of entertaining verbal incontinence that floods the auditorium with laughter. In terms of word-count (and gag-count), it’s as if you’re getting two shows for the price of one, as – name-dropping a-go-go – he yatters on about everything under his sunny gaze: Sheila Hancock and he watching Naked Attraction for Celebrity Gogglebox, having to share a tent with Ann Widdecombe for a telly thing, and his voice-over for, yes, an incontinence pad ad.
His natural born garrulity, he explains, was such a source of irritation to his older sisters they drowned him out with blasts of Sweet Caroline and pleaded with his parents – a pocket-money whip-round pledged to boot – to send him to boarding school. And off the prodigy went. I suspect his material about Michael Parkinson has hit the cutting-room floor by now, but he has so much up his sleeve (he broke the world record for after-dinner speaking, and thereby hangs a urinary tale) that such editing would hardly faze him.
His party-piece is an audience member choosing topics of conversation from a menu. Tip: “My Worst Ever Moment” is worth every excruciating second. “How to live to be 100”? After the wit comes the wisdom: happy people live longer. “All the research shows that an engagement with life, being tested, is key to finding happiness… to be happy you’ve got to have a sense of purpose.” Daft as it sounds, our raconteur in chief has the inside scoop on how to save the country from rack and ruin. DC
Ticket: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Jon Culshaw: Imposter Syndrome ★★★★☆
Where: Gilded Balloon Teviot (Debating Hall)
When: 4pm
Until: Aug 27
In a nutshell: “The news changes very quickly, characters come and go,” Dead Ringers star Jon Culshaw says at the start of his hour, identifying the dizzying lot of the impressionist today. The news churn and rapid turn-over of household names may make his task harder but it means the public is even more eager to snack on the comfort-food of his certainty and consistency; “nailing” these characters offers a semblance of fixity amid the flux. And there is something almost reassuringly otherworldly about his ability to conjure different personae at will, a trick that doesn’t weary with repetition.
Part of Culshaw’s appeal is that he lets us in on the secret of the way the public figures he summons themselves operate – so, for instance, his impersonation of Tony Blair walks us through the routine of Blair’s mounting rhetorical frenzy, from “hesitant and staccato manner” past “serious pointy finger” to full-on Dalek. Likewise Obama, from statesmanlike and relaxed through to “let’s get ready to rumble!” mode. Johnson is just a whirl of incoherent noises, while the doolally spirit of Joe Biden is rendered by having him earnestly intone the nonsense lyrics to They Might Be Giants’ “Build a Little Birdhouse in Your Soul”.
Not every take-off lands. His Rees-Mogg is missing a notch of lordly gravity, and while some of the musical numbers (the Spider Man theme-tune meets Les Mis’s Bring Him Home) are inspired, others – Oasis reimagined in middle-age, say – are merely middling. But it’s a testament to his skill, that time and again – whether it’s anatomising the breathless arias of Richard Wilson’s Victor Meldrew or distinguishing Lancashire and Yorkshire accents, he wins rounds of delighted applause. DC
Tickets: 0131 622 6552; gildedballoon.co.uk
Luke Kempner in Gritty Police Drama: A One-Man Musical ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Upstairs)
When: 5.30pm (also 11pm, 24)
Until: Aug 27
In a nutshell: It’s a bit of a mouthful that title, but it indicates just how much Kempner is trying to cram into his hour – a parody of a primetime police drama, shot through with a quest to make that parody as gritty as possible, and deliberately undercut by an accompanying resolve to spoof musicals. It should really just be called Luke Kempner: DI Bullseye, because it works.
We’re in the company of Ted Hastings from Line of Duty, and also Catherine from Happy Valley (“I’m a northern character, so I’ll do northern things”) and Luther too (“I just found this amazing hotel from booking.com”). Their breakneck mission is to find out who killed James Corden, part of an organised drug ring shipping anti-ageing substances to celebs: “A retiring officer, check. A dramatic phone-call, check. The murder of a national treasure, hmm…”
James Corden’s annoying laugh gets weighed against that of Alan Carr and Jimmy Carr, and a police-van load of VIPs join the mission, either as sleuths or suspects, whether it be Louis Theroux (“Being a detective is weird isn’t it?”), or King Charles, who attends via Zoom-call. It’s sometimes hard to keep up with the plot, not least because Kempner is doing 60 impressions in 60 minutes, but such is his good-natured verve, and bravura singing to boot (a niftily re-written “A Whole New World”, sung by Prince Harry), you’re swept along. With at least one good gag a minute as well as those voices, this is his most accomplished show since his Downton Abbey debut. DC
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Luisa Omielan: Bitter ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 3)
When: 5.40pm (not 21)
Until: Aug 27
![Luisa Omielan is at Monkey Barrel Comedy until August 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/18/TELEMMGLPICT000218617298_16923577823720_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqX3h-02jQDCnO5JAyiE6eAUQS4k8Y0lzg1bNPtpDTNn8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Few comedians better roused a fightback spirit against the drabness and fatigue of the austerity years than Birmingham-born Luisa Omielan, who hurled colour, music, outspoken life and feminist sass into the comedy scene with her high-impact, full-on shows What Would Beyonce Do?! and Am I Right Ladies?!
If there was any justice, she’d have gone from strength to strength in terms of audience reach and due payback, but as the blunt title of her latest opus suggests, things have taken a turn for the embittering, and she’s not too proud to tell it like it is. Despite the hard-hitting nature of her last show Politics for Bitches, which managed mirthfully but incisively to detail her mother’s death, the deficiencies of the NHS and the failings of the political system, she finds herself, post-Covid, in a strange wilderness, cash-strapped, consigned to yesterday’s news by comedy influencers, watching as others build on the foundations she set down.
Yes, this is a comedy cri de coeur that tips at points into a babbling – if endearing – rant at the unfairness of it all (“I’m trying not to make this a pity party but it’s my hour, so f--- it!”). But as she retraces her life (complete with childhood difficulties) and career to-date (complete with the horror-show of a New York residency), she moves beyond introspection to zeitgeist-tapping reflection.
There’s a point at which the irresistible force of a dream to pursue comedy meets the immovable object of a rigged system, which devours the best years of your life for little return – at which juncture, how, and why, do you continue to make people laugh? Omielan does, just, here, somehow – but her sapped spirit articulates the exhaustion of Britain’s shattered entrepreneurial classes at present. “The compact has changed… You’re not working nine to five any more, you’re working nine to eight, not to get a Chinese take-away, you can’t afford that, you’re deciding which room to heat, while your boss is onto their eighth home...” (I paraphrase slightly) Perhaps life in the UK 2023 is no laughing matter; and perhaps this show, rough and ready as it is, is the festival’s most stinging. DC
Tickets: 0131 226 0002; edfringe.com
Ed Byrne: Tragedy Plus Time ★★★★☆
Where: Assembly Rooms (Music Hall)
When: 9.30pm
Until: Aug 27
![Ed Byrne is at the Assembly Rooms until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/17/TELEMMGLPICT000339881041_16922758280980_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRo0U4xU-30oDveS4pXV-Vv4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: It’s 25 years since Ed Byrne was nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award (then Perrier) and there’s an unavoidable poignancy about him joining the fray at the Fringe again this year, in the wake of his younger brother Paul’s death last year, aged 44. Not that he displays a jot of self-pity or iota of sentimentality as he pays affectionate joshing tribute to baby Byrne (a comedy writer and director who wanted “Burn Baby Burn” to play at his cremation). “If you don’t laugh at this s--- you’re the one disrespecting the dead,” the Dublin-born wag – whose patter seems to career on roller-skates – advises, explaining that the cause of his brother’s decline – aside from Covid – was liver failure: “I say it failed, it didn’t do it on its own, there was a certain amount of user error.”
He ranges across a variety of topics along the way – including the idiocy of conspiracy theorists – and it’s hard not to warm to the Byrne clan, who seem to have funny bones and big hearts. That said, the fact that Ed fell out with, and didn’t talk to, his bro for months before he fell ill is as wretched as it is typical of many families. His ill-advised playing of a rock album by indie band Sebadoh to his dying sibling (a cacophonous sample of which we hear) invites as much pained disbelief as mirth, but the show’s innate consolation is that it’s OK to laugh at the bad stuff and family fails; overall it’s as potent a reminder of the cliché about life being short as you could wish. DC
Ticket: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Paul Foot: Dissolve ★★★★☆
Where: Underbelly, Cowgate (Belly Dancer)
When: 7.20pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 15)
![Paul Foot: Dissolve is at the Underbelly Cowgate](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/16/TELEMMGLPICT000345899870_16921768712060_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqhpL9wIsx6QnAoaHzcNRkTtpo_ECDpFELYnB1SrAlgVo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: It’s almost tempting to give Paul Foot one star, just to test whether the grand assertion at the heart of Dissolve holds good, namely that he has arrived at an unprecedented state of calm and contentment, in which nothing bothers him. Though he does not, and cannot, fully explain how he has attained this lasting thunderclap of good-will – like some latter-day redeemed Scrooge – he’s so plausible in his mystification that you credit his newfound happiness, which he dates – with ludicrous yet persuasive accuracy – to March 20, 2022, 4.59pm.
The plain detail of his prior troughs helps bolster our belief in his unlikely breakthrough: the 35 long years inside a glass-box of depression and disconnection that left him feeling “half-alive”. At once shambling and in sly control, the 49-year-old manages to spill the beans – with a shock revelation thrown in midway – but ensures that nothing is too tidily resolved, darting between frank admission and arrant nonsense, as when he relives his erstwhile capacity to get angry about purely imaginary scenarios, among them a fractious dinner-date with the former Labour MP Chuka Umunna (“You could at least offer to pay for the starters!”). Throw in, after a strangely wobbly start, some astute apercus about people who hate change and the salutary teenage ordeals of Tutankhamun and you’ve got one of 2023’s most life-affirming oddities, and Foot at his idiosyncratic best. DC
Tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Krystal Evans: The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp ★★★☆☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)
When: 7.35pm
Until: Aug 27
![Krystal Evans is at Monkey Barrel Comedy until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/16/TELEMMGLPICT000340298257_16921778606220_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqyMdaaiqQgyrBk-Jo4EFgwHwOUvXTFceNJoDdzNSKVgw.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Of the many personal stories being aired at this year’s Fringe probably the saddest – and therefore the hardest to transmute into comedy gold – is that of Krystal Evans, who was raised working-class and poor in Washington State and is now making her Fringe debut in a down-at-heel joint off the Royal Mile. Evans revisits the hideous night in March 2000 when, aged 14, she woke up to find flames licking at her bedroom door, and had to smash a window to escape the mobile home that she, her mother and her little sister lived in. Her six-year-old sibling perished in the fire and Evans was inevitably left with physical and emotional scars. Time has healed the former; perhaps choosing to air the latter now, aged 37, will provide some closure for her. There’s clearly a lot of resentment still lurking about her chaotic mother’s inattention (and need for attention, too – “Mom was crying... everyone was looking at her, so she was having a great time”). Her memorable set should also open some doors for her, career-wise. She has a natural way with timing and phrasing, too, mixing flip remarks and home truths. DC
Tickets: 0131 226 0002; edfringe.com
House of Life ★★★★★
Where: Underbelly, Cowgate (Belly Dancer)
When: 8.55pm
Until: Aug 27
![House of Life at the Underbelly Cowgate](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/15/TELEMMGLPICT000345824730_16920923889410_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqERCyFNcLUIKPeqT28e10mxtQ60OJYi1Gt2JYhrQ6JWI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
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
Tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Alex Franklin: I Must Reach the Summit, Please God I Must Reach the Summit ★★★☆☆
Where: Underbelly Cowgate (Delhi Belly)
When: 3.55pm
Until: Aug 27
![Alex Franklin is at the Underbelly until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755206_16920262154840_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNUHzxaamNmHDqK-YksWRz0-Zkeq22DP0pP_ERpmv4gg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: I suspect the more time you spend online, the more you’ll enjoy Alex Franklin’s scattershot show, a grab-bag of left-field stand-up, sketches and musical comedy. It’s not just about getting the references (one running joke nods to a viral video from 2009) but a question of sensibility: many of the skits here feel like weird internet memes brought to giddy life.
Franklin’s persona is a fresh, intriguing clash of opposites: deadpan cynicism and innocent silliness; a veneer of megalomaniac hyper-confidence that constantly cracks to reveal the vulnerability behind it. (“Daddy issues”, and Franklin’s yearning for approval, are a kind of leitmotif to these surreal skits.)
There are some very funny one-liners and memorable routines here – particularly the body-popping physical comedy of a sketch about the language of bees. But the muddled whole is somehow less than the sum of its winningly weird parts; the finale tries to tie them together in an onstage breakdown (itself something of a Fringe trope), but doesn’t quite succeed. Still, it’ll be fascinating to see where Franklin goes next. As the title suggests, this young comic is on the way up. TFS
Tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Stamptown Comedy Night ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Forth)
When: 11pm
Until: Aug 26 (not 14-15 or 20-23)
![Stamptown Comedy Night is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755176_16920263746990_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwSX5rhseiWKOo9p9OQ-ymek.jpeg?imwidth=350)
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
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
William Stone: Lofi Jokes to Study/Relax to ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (The Cellar)
When: 8pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 15)
![William Stone is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755172_16920263452650_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Imagine a recording of a Milton Jones show played at half-speed, and you’ll have the flavour of William Stone’s well-pitched Fringe debut: silly-smart one-liners doled out at a comically slow pace, in soothing low mood-lighting.
There’s real craftsmanship to his writing – Stone would clearly be an asset to any panel show’s writing room – and the few groan-worthy duds here are the exception, not the rule: he has two or three of the best standalone jokes I’ve heard this fringe.
Still, one of his more formulaic lines – “Wondering what the show is about? It’s about 10 minutes too short at the moment” – has a grain of truth. For all it’s playfully acknowledged and presented as a deliberate choice, there’s still a sense his material is being stretched thin. Leaning further into his relaxation-playlist conceit with a bit more music might have helped; the best routine here pairs his whimsical pensées with mellow acoustic guitar.
But Stone’s a talent to watch, and fully in control of his half-nonchalant, half-rumpled stage persona: one joke, “I did one of those personality tests… mine came back negative,” neatly sums up his self-effacing shtick. Warmly recommended. TFS
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
John Robertson’s The Dark Room ★★★★☆
Where: Gilded Balloon Teviot (Dining Room)
When: 10pm (extra shows at 11.30pm on Aug 18, 19, 25, 26)
Until: Aug 27
![John Robertson's The Dark Room is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345772628_16920262868390_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqYh_8IBLdAWMRn6BKLOqynK5Pb5M7WmhevXNV7gH84jE.jpeg?imwidth=350)
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
Tickets: 0131 622 6552; gildedballoon.co.uk
Charlie Vero-Martin: Picnic ★★★☆☆
Where: Underbelly Cowgate (Delhi Belly)
When: 6.55pm
Until: Aug 27
![Charlie Vero-Martin is at the Underbelly Cowgate](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755218_16920261589480_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqCKQT0PXyAw9lN4HQjnBQHep1WnwAWfLF2YgsIS_3YGE.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Young Scottish sketch comedian Charlie Vero-Martin’s throwing a picnic, and we’re all invited. The funniest character in her Fringe debut is also the most satirical: Persephone Gemstone, author of “White Woman Hugging Tree”, a vapid yet Machiavellian influencer whose “Magic of Yoni” wellness retreats boast the slogan “Whatever it is, we’ve got a yurt for that.” It’s a comic high-point, and left me wishing for more bite elsewhere.
At her best, she channels a kind of whimsical madness, but too many characters (such as a vaguely Germanic marine biologist) don’t build on the silliness of the starting point. There’s a weightless, innocuous flavour to the hour, a mid-gear niceness, which is reversed, if not fully redeemed, by a last-minute twist involving her silent, scene-stealing assistant. That finale (which it’d be a crime to spoil) shows a darker side to Vero-Martin’s comic repertoire, and bodes well for the future. TFS
Tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Max & Ivan: Life, Choices ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Above)
When: 5.20pm (or 10.45pm on Aug 19)
Until: Aug 27 (not 26)
![Max & Ivan: Life, Choices is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755178_16920260326390_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqjJeHvIwLm2xPr27m7LF8mUYMapKPjdhyLnv9ax6_too.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: One of the better stage double-acts of the last two decades, Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez here leave sketches and characters behind for confessional repartee, in a navel-gazing yet warmhearted show about growing older, growing apart, and grappling with mid-level fame as middle-age approaches. The best line here isn’t technically theirs, but from a playwright friend who described them as “cursed by the almost-plausibility of [their] careers”.
It can be a bad idea to “monetise your hobby and your friendship”, reflects Max, the more ambitious and uptight of the two, looking back over 16 years of pulling his hair out at Ivan’s happy-go-lucky flakiness. Though dramatic conventions mean we know that Max will have an epiphany and apologise for his griping by the end of the hour, there’s still an airing-dirty-laundry quality to his complaints about doing most of the hard work of writing for the duo.
Why are this mismatched pair the way they are? Perhaps because of their dads, whom we meet in projected videos. Olesker’s ambition makes him the opposite of his head-in-the-clouds academic dad, while the less-than-speedy Gonzales’s lack of work ethic and settled family-man status couldn’t be further from his wide-boy lothario father, whose semi-legal, Del Boy-esque business schemes are the source of the hour’s biggest laughs.
It helps if you’re already invested in their friendship; if you’re a fan, add an extra star. Life, Choices is not Max & Ivan’s best show, but if it proves to be their last, it’ll be a fitting, bittersweet send-off. TFS
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Avital Ash Workshops Her Suicide Note ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron)
When: 10.05pm
Until: Aug 27
![Avital Ash Workshops her Suicide Note is at The Tron until Aug 27](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755179_16920074188420_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqgsaO8O78rhmZrDxTlQBjdLdu0TL-Cg_AMOUqySXmFgU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: “Let’s ease into things…” begins the LA-based Avital Ash at the start of her hour. “My biological mum killed herself when I was a baby – but it’s fine… I was a really bad baby... My first words were ‘Kill yourself!’” She then tops that body-slam of a gag with an admission of her own suicidal impulses, which she’s able to check with various thoughts – not least, “Who wants to turn into their mother?”
Even so, she breezily enlists her audience to consider a range of suicide notes she might leave behind (“Option four – ‘So that happened!..’”). It might seem like bad form to quote such choice (and sensitive) material but a) there’s plenty more where that came from and b) this gives an inkling of the élan with which this Edinburgh debutante takes the rawest subject-matter and brings to it an unsentimental eye for a razor-sharp joke, while acknowledging that as a coping mechanism.
She takes us through the initial secrecy that surrounded her mother’s death, her Jewish upbringing, the confusions of youth, sexual trauma, and some perturbing black-out episodes. In a world where victim-mode seems to be the default and fear of causing upset ubiquitous, her smiling, off-hand candour is refreshing, without ever being blandly relaxing. One second she’s light, the next dark, keeping you on the edge of your seat, wriggling as to how to respond, and generally in awe. DC
Tickets: 0131 226 0000; edfringe.com
Mary O’Connell: Money Princess ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three)
When: 6pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 15)
![Mary O'Connell: Money Princess is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755177_16920085885550_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Hate capitalism, love shopping? Annoyed that people with less money than you are having a better time? Mary O’Connell’s impressive debut is one of the most relatable shows of the Fringe, stuck as we are in a cost of living crisis. O’Connell’s skill is to deliver the most casual, pragmatic of sucker-punches on the trappings of materialism from the point of view of someone who has yet to give up the day job in TV development, and is desperate enough to enter a comedy competition run by controversial website OnlyFans. That we can still emphatically relate when the rug is finally pulled from under us is a credit to the direction of rising star Elf Lyons, who allows the show’s cleverness to creep up on you. O’Connell’s one of us because she’s obsessed with success and terrified of failure – the latter is not something she has to worry about here. SL
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Rob Auton: The Rob Auton Show ★★★☆☆
Where: Assembly Roxy (Upstairs)
When: 2.25pm
Until: Aug 26
![The Rob Auton Show is at Assembly Roxy](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755205_16920086438890_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqEZfhQK0a8oCmxjU1NL-KcswZgCewa-xkrckcIXHk6m8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: For the past nine years, poet and comedian Rob Auton has parachuted into the Fringe with shows called things like The Time Show, The Yellow Show, and The Sky Show – all playful ruminations on the paradoxes that lie within each theme. Now the Yorkshireman is zero-ing in on the subject with which most comedians start: himself. From the trials of an arty (rather than sporty) childhood, to an advertising agency too corporate for his out-of-the-box thinking, to his first job in a kitchen – where one man’s bullying is another’s right of passage – it’s shot through with Auton’s usual low-fi, whimsical poetry. What do we learn? What he’s always been telling us – that the fight to find joy and beauty in the mundane everyday is a rewarding one. A little bit of Fringe loveliness. SL
Ticket: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Chloe Radcliffe: Cheat ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three)
When: 7.15pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![Chloe Radcliffe: Cheat is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000345755207_16920086915420_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: There’s a remarkable number of impressive, gobby US comics making their Fringe debuts this year, each with grabby stories to tell. So if the New York-based Radcliffe only earns a strong three stars for her hour of good-natured tell-all, it’s partly due to the sheer strength of the competition.
Radcliffe’s moreish round of over-sharing reveals a woman who commits with some sincerity to monogamous relationships, only repeatedly (against her own resolve) to look over her partner’s shoulder and hanker after the next mysterious other, and the endorphin rush of a new liaison. In a very non-judgemental and often laugh out-loud set, she ponders the nature of cheating (does the rubbing of elbows count?), and walks us through sundry get-togethers: from a quickie with a hot Fed-Ex delivery man to the dishy cold-fish who equated kissing with pulling a lever, and was in turn gradually usurped by a couch-surfing guy with a stutter.
Underpinning the restlessness is less a generational attitude as an early youth divided between low self-esteem and precocity (“‘Precocious’ means you know a lot of words, but you spit when you talk”), and a too-absent dad. A promising start, all told; it’ll be interesting to see whether this unbridled up-and-comer can stay the course. DC
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Matt Forde: Inside No 10 ★★★☆☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Beyond)
When: 8pm
Until: Aug 27
![Matt Forde: Inside No 10 is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/14/TELEMMGLPICT000341600550_16920087425510_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqLf6XVudQ0d-fF3pHUPFzENHhMh81Y8GqX3ipA8YMo0k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: In theory, these are golden days for Matt Forde, whose impressions of top politicians and knowledge-fuelled commentary (mostly scathing) about the political class are in a league of their own. Demand to see Forde in action at the Pleasance outstrips supply – the place is rammed. Even so, aren’t we at a weird, exhausted point in the life of this government where the yah-boo side of satire can’t compensate for the draining toll it’s all taking? While Forde has plenty to chew on, there’ll surely be much more that’s fresh – and more appetite in us, too – once we head into the election year, when by rights he should be playing to arenas. As things stand, there’s a five-star show nestling somewhere inside a fairly middling, if entertaining hour, in which the dependably slick wag pleasingly attacks the expected suspects – waffling Johnson, orotund Rees-Mogg, facile Sunak, stentorian Farage, pompous Starmer and dismal Truss (“a one-night stand that didn’t even last the night”), as well as guying those flannelling Royal correspondents including (deep breath) Huw Edwards. DC
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Amy Webber: No Previous Experience ★★★☆☆
Where: Just the Tonic at the Mash House (Just the Attic)
When: 2.40pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![Amy Webber performs at Just the Tonic at the Mash House](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000345595564_16918572862220_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9WVLDaeaWzlxIQpTU2T6YjQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Armed with a tiny keyboard and a degree in opera, golden-voiced musical comic Amy Webber makes a joyful debut here, with a show about being unemployable. (It opens with her CV, rendered through the medium of song.) Along the way, we get a Philomena Cunk-ish lesson in music history (“Musics was invented [sic] in 1355”), with an amusing Gregorian chant about – of all things – wildebeest.
She spoofs every BBC Radio station in an entertaining if not wholly original routine seemingly tailor-made for Radio 4 (where, as it happens, she’s already performed). It’s a hit-and-miss hour, and the joke-writing isn’t always on a par with the spirited delivery, but Webber’s underdog charm keeps the sold-out crowd onside. It’s one in the eye to the condescending agent who (she confesses, in a slightly over-earnest conclusion) recently told her she wasn’t ready for professional representation. He’s surely kicking himself. If another agent hasn’t snapped her up by the end of the month, I’ll eat my press card. TFS
Tickets: justthetonic.com
Sara Pascoe: Success Story ★★★☆☆
Where: Underbelly, Bristo Square (McEwan Hall)
When: 7.30pm
Dates: Aug 18 only
![Sara Pascoe on stage for her latest tour, Success Story](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000325287633_16918605006800_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqOrzxZMK-6b0U8gB15Q-vRCQmarrHMyfCtr8wHgxIWd0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: It’s a convention of mainstream stand-up that the comedian is just like you: an ordinary, relatable person with an ordinary, relatable life. They hang out with normal friends down the pub, chat with strangers at the bus-stop, and so on. If, in reality, you spend your days eating braised swan with Oscar-winners, it’s a faux pas to mention it.
Sara Pascoe’s new tour cheerily demolishes that convention. Thanks to TV panel shows, she is at the “middle” level of success, where one sometimes bumps into the super-famous but it’s “never not weird”. In her usual distractible, giddy style, she exposes that weirdness in Success Story’s first half, in what’s essentially a string of dinner-party anecdotes about celebrity encounters. Not only has Pascoe been on a dancefloor with Salman Rushdie and Benedict Cumberbatch (yes, together), but in a fine bit of physical comedy she imitates their moves.
The second half, about motherhood, is more personal and more tightly written, with all the show’s best lines. Pascoe is frank and funny about her fertility struggles: IVF, she jokes, is “the most ethical way to buy a baby”. She tackles old topics – choosing a baby’s name, for instance – with an off-kilter logic that makes them feel fresh.
Pascoe has always been good at callbacks, and here a string of revisited jokes neatly ties the whole thing up with a bow. Were the first half as strong as the second, this would be a four-star show. Still, it feels apt for a show about being moderately successful to be, well, a moderate success. TFS Reviewed at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, February 2023
Tickets: 0131 510 0395; underbellyedinburgh.co.uk
Julia Masli: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 4)
When: 00.05am until Aug 15; 1.30am from Aug 16
Until: Aug 27
![Julia Masli performs at Monkey Barrel Comedy](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000345595584_16918573751860_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNJjoeBT78QIaYdkJdEY4CnGTJFJS74MYhNY6w3GNbO8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Last year, The Telegraph jokingly invented a spoof award – Best Sad Clown – just to give it to the mesmerising Julia Masli, snubbed by the official Comedy Awards for her superb debut CHOOSH! (which returns this year, Aug 22-27), a loosely plot-driven hour of clowning about moving to a new country. For this follow-up, she’s ditched narrative completely – along with social etiquette, logic, and health-and-safety. (But she hasn’t abandoned structure, or not entirely: “I don’t have an ending!”, she jokes at the top of the hour, but a clever, uplifting tech-led finale ties everything up with a bow.)
If you hate audience participation, run for the hills; if you love it, this is the kind of undiluted midnight madness that could only happen at the Fringe. It starts with Masli smashing a chair and gaffer-taping a microphone to the gold mannequin’s leg she’s inexplicably wearing as an arm. From there, things really get strange.
Masli trained at the clown school of Philippe Gaulier, the foul-mouthed Gallic guru who taught Sacha Baron Cohen. Her crowd work has something of Cohen’s gasp-inducing audacity, but with a weird, wide-eyed, embattled optimism that’s all her own.
The premise here is that she wants to solve the world’s problems, one person at a time. “You have problem?” she asks, shoving a microphone into each volunteer/victim’s face. (That question is made funnier with each repetition by Masli’s spaced-out delivery, which leans into her strong Estonian accent and non-standard English.)
Answer with a “no”, and – well, woe betide you. But answer with a “yes”, and she immediately takes it upon herself to help, hauling punters up onstage, and producing props seemingly from nowhere, like a deranged Wizard of Oz. A bit tired? She’ll build you a bed onstage. Trouble with bills? She’ll start a crowdfunder. My partner foolishly admitted her “problem” was that someone had spilt a drink on her, so she spent the next half-hour duct-taped to a rotating desk fan.
This show might not solve your problems, but it’s a delightfully surreal distraction from them. TFS
Tickets: 0131 226 0002; edfringe.com
Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?! ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Forth)
When: 5.20pm
Dates: Aug 24 only
![Leo Reich is at the Pleasance Courtyard on Aug 24](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000306038105_16918608809850_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqRsvUM2X0RE0xScIyAFB5Uk0LoKc4qSRYG1k6EyxQm_I.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Not since Jack Whitehall emerged at the Fringe have I come away with a surer sense that stardom beckons for a newcomer. In his first full-length show, Leo Reich talks about growing up gay, and pining for his best friend at school – the relayed pains of youth countered by bursts of parodically upbeat pop (music by Toby Marlow, who co-wrote Six). In itself, this isn’t hugely novel – nor are the outré glances at gay life today. What’s buzz-making is his zesty, Generation Z grasp of reality, or lack thereof. Reich at once presents himself as an object of satire – vapid, ignorant, impatient – and also a wit-armed rebel against that hollowness. Zipping from one apercu to the next, the height of fickle, his act laughs at the online age’s theatre of the self. A dazzling debut. DC Reviewed at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Huge Davies: Whodunnit ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Upstairs)
When: 9.40pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 16)
![Huge Davies performs at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000345595566_16918574037760_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqyyYx0atOosQ9Zpn7DWexondR78eTBj0hwdfFRfV9oOU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: In 1929, the novelist Ronald Knox laid down his “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction”. Number five: “No Chinaman must figure in the story.” British-Asian musical comic Huge (or, to his parents, Hugh) Davies gets an early laugh from that list in this show, while also using it as bait for one of countless callbacks, in a cleverly knitted-together hour that slowly morphs into a murder mystery.
With a full-size Yamaha keyboard strung across his neck, Davies tells a shaggy-dog story about a trip to Nandos with a handful of old friends, who are soon dropping like flies. Meanwhile, bits of incriminating evidence are laced through his supposedly unrelated comedy songs (a wry Arctic Monkeys spoof; a sharp bit of music education about why TV producers love pizzicato).
Stewart Lee-ishly telling off the audience (“I have thrown out three people for laughing in a way I didn’t like”), he adopts a dour, deadpan, borderline-brusque stage persona that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But get on board, and it’s a dark treat; his pitch-black, knowingly non-seasonal routine about Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman had me shaking with laughter. Davies had an Edinburgh Comedy Award nod for his first show, 2019’s The Carpark; this is a huge step up from there. TFS
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Alex Edelman: Just for Us ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (The Grand)
When: 11pm
Dates: Aug 26 only
![Alex Edelman returns to the Pleasance Courtyard on Aug 26](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000322398735_16918611569140_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq2GeyommrMNVwqkZdyIaJg8RpMj0_IJhv0hwqeAF0G_A.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: “I’m going to tell you a story,” Alex Edelman says at the beginning of Just For Us. And what a story, featuring anti-Semitism, sibling rivalry, Harry and Meghan’s wedding, the American class system and much more.
Voted best newcomer at the 2014 Edinburgh Comedy Awards, Edelman has tweaked the show that he performed at 2018’s Fringe, for a Broadway run. Some of the original show’s weaker elements have been replaced with much stronger material, but the core story remains; how he, after receiving a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse online, decided to attend, incognito, a White Nationalist meeting in Queens, New York City.
Edelman, a dry performer with a taste for puns, has an eye for the absurd – jigsaw puzzles and pastries feature here – and is the master of callbacks. While he doesn’t dig too deeply into what anti-Semitism feels like up close and personal, this is a beautifully constructed show – and he ends on a high with a doozy of a payoff. VL Reviewed at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, January 2023
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Ania Magliano: I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand)
When: 4.35pm (extra show at 9.30pm on Aug 27)
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![Ania Magliano is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/11/TELEMMGLPICT000345486485_16917736434890_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqnFFw0T6y0h51XGNq0nohM2QnZJIETfWB_fUbKb77n0w.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: One of the most buzzed-about acts in town, Ania Magliano sold out her month-long run back in July. Her 2022 debut show was a likeable hour of straight-down-the-line stand-up about “being boring”, a confident calling card, but not quite enough to justify the hype. At first, this impressive follow-up seems cut from the same cloth; it’s about the time she was “a victim… of a really bad haircut.”
Awkwardness at the hairdresser’s might be the stalest topic in stand-up (second to airline food), but she manages to find a fresh spin on it: her surreal riff about “sink gremlins” who forcefully shampoo clients is a keeper. Yet there’s more going on here than there first appears.
Magliano’s breezy, confident, laid-back delivery is subtly at odds with what’s actually happening in her wry anecdotes about life after that trim: she started taking therapy and martial arts classes, got breast reduction surgery, felt unsafe in relationships. It wasn’t really the haircut that upset her, we learn, but something else. Soon we’re in darker territory, but it’s handled so lightly you hardly notice the shift. Now that takes real skill. TFS
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
John Robins: Howl ★★★★☆
Where: Just the Tonic Nucleus (Just the Tonic’s Atomic Room)
When: 8.50pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 14, 21); then touring Sept 14-Dec 15
![John Robins: Howl is at Just the Tonic Nucleus](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/11/TELEMMGLPICT000343756692_16917714655630_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqFOgdDOZBSSpUpWf9Rnp5s34ihL9D5G77hk2Gx25ScXg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: How ironic – on the very night when he’s celebrating being exactly nine months sober, John Robins’s show was repeatedly derailed by a drunken heckler. The stand-up and Radio 5Live presenter defused the situation gently but deftly, winning more sympathy in a show that had already earnt him plenty.
“Howl” is an good title for an hour about being trapped between crippling anxiety and the booze he tried to blot it out with. Beckett was right: nothing is funnier than unhappiness. In one routine here, a server at a drive-thru asks a despairing Robins: “Can I help you, sir?” He replies, “I’d be astonished,” and the sheer anguish he throws into that last word gets one of the largest laughs of the night.
Robins first realised something was really wrong when he the simple task of buying a spoon somehow sent him into an obsessive, pedantic, and (in this telling) tragically funny downward spiral. It’s a fine routine that’ll remind fans of his breakdown over a dehumidifier in his Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning 2019 show.
There’s poetic writing here – alcoholism, Robins says, “is as much as I want to know of hell” - but Howl is a raw show in more than one sense; visceral, yet in places comedically undercooked, the jokes falling away entirely for an ending that sends the crowd out on a note of muted catharsis. Perhaps some of these wounds are too fresh for Robins to find the funny side; perhaps it’s all too much to process in an hour. This is that rare thing, a Fringe hour that feels like it would benefit from being longer; fortunately, he’s touring a more fleshed-out version from September. TFS
Tickets: johnrobins.com
Jazz Emu: You Shouldn’t Have ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Pleasance Two)
When: 9.40pm
Dates: Aug 17-27
![Jazz Emu: You Shouldn't Have is at the Pleasance Courtyard from Aug 17](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000306228479_16918615398560_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpQ0vMMZu_p35I0xEFXLC8W7ONh6xTYDYpy50WxDJi1s.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: This is a work of genius. Jazz Emu (Archie Henderson) is a one-man Flight of the Conchords, a comedy songwriter who turns his virtuoso musicianship into part of the joke. He sings everything from opera to pop, playing electric bass, guitar, keys, and synth flute, while jamming live over the top of his pre-recorded videos (directed with exquisite retro-stylings by Hunter Allen).
His persona is a magnetic, fully three-dimensional comic creation. In the opening number, he dons a reflective metal DJ mask for a dancefloor banger that positions him as a kind of Dafter Punk. But he speaks with an unplaceable, faintly Scandinavian accent; he has the angular dance moves and wardrobe of Jarvis Cocker; his musical metier is smoother-than-smooth jazz-funk.
There’s a complex backstory – nay, a whole comic universe – underpinning the songs. Born into a family of embittered foley artists (there are mid-show Zoom calls from his disappointed dad), Jazz Emu became a Europop star – and then an online punching-bag, after making a goblin-phobic comment during a gig in Helsinki. This show is his wonderfully insincere attempt at a celebrity apology. Stuck in an Edinburgh Fringe venue, he’d much rather be playing the O2; give him a few years, and he just might be. TFS Reviewed at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Nick Pupo: Addicted ★★★★☆
Where: Just the Tonic at the Bottle Room
When: 6pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![Nick Pupo](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/11/TELEMMGLPICT000345465263_16917621029440_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqL4FvDAMpGe9Zvrr4zpcfuWQnZJIETfWB_fUbKb77n0w.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: New York-based comedian Pupo (a recurring guest star on Daisy Jones & The Six on Amazon Prime) is in full confessional mode here, about a life that could have been loaded to the brink with self-inflicted tragedy, but which has re-attained an upward trajectory thanks to comedy (and cleaning up his act). He revisits his childhood best-friendship with a boy called Charlie and their gradual estrangement because of his compulsion to lie, and eventually – despite vowing he would never take drugs – his becoming a heroin user. Sometimes your mouth is more slack with incredulity (at the accidental death of a hamster, and tense encounters in a drug-den, say) than agape with laughter, and his spiel can get a bit counsellor’s couch. Still, his tale is so absorbing – throwing up questions about the choices we make, the people we become – and Pupo has such a natural wit, it’s almost Netflix special’-able. DC
Tickets: justthetonic.com
André De Freitas: What If? ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Two)
When: 8.10pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![André de Freitas](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/11/TELEMMGLPICT000345466668_16917627861620_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqq_qgMPlrc8eEbc3OtBKjlocdg3w9_fXxH_UpIo-JDLo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Twinkly 28-year-old Portuguese charmer De Freitas has been hailed by Alan Carr as “a star”, and his Edinburgh Fringe debut suggests a fluency in English, an audience rapport, and a combination of goofball quirkiness and plain intelligence that could see him go far. “The last big thing we had before Christiano Ronaldo was Brazil,” he says segueing from self-deprecation to the affable mockery of his homeland. He confides the bizarre side to his family – including an ever-on-her-deathbed grandma (“It’s killing me…”, he quips, re the visiting costs), and an uncle with a peculiar predilection for electrical appliances and lights (“Ironically, he can’t work a printer”). He divulges a picaresque tale of slumming it in London and New York in his scoffed-at bid to become a stand-up king, his dire finances leading him to consider becoming a male escort. The snag? Demand wasn’t so hot – “I’m not going to become a male escort, just to end up as a struggling male escort! What, I have to find a second job to support my prostitution?” A pleasure. DC
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Kieran Hodgson: Big in Scotland ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Forth)
When: 7pm (plus extra shows at 9.30pm, Aug 12 & 19)
Until: Aug 27
![Kieran Hodgson's show Big in Scotland is at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/09/TELEMMGLPICT000345303570_16915999563600_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq4L-BzpqaJlGuN7mplh0OuKxcNtfVRWfiTqL94KJUfB0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Last month, 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
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Trash Salad ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (The Attic)
When: 2.55pm
Until: Aug 15
![Rosa Garland returns to the Edinburgh Fringe as Trash Salad](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000345609635_16918617691730_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: We’re living in a good age for weird burlesque. Young stars such as the green-haired maverick Lolo Brow are mischievously subverting the form with outlandish clowning, more silly than sexy, blending eroticism with disgust.
Charming French performer Rosa Garland’s lettuce-themed Fringe debut belongs to that new wave. Lip-synching, stripping, dancing and just fooling about, her character “Trash Salad” plucks veg from all sorts of unlikely places, dances a duet with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and – in a funny, clever set-piece – has an earnest phone call with her compost-heap mother, whose words appear on-screen as Star Wars scrolling text. It’s certainly one way to get your five a day. TFS Reviewed at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; pleasance.co.uk
Tom Crosbie: Actions Speak Louder Than Nerds ★★★★☆
Where: Gilded Balloon Teviot (Dining Room)
When: 2.30pm
Until: Aug 28
![Tom Crosbie performs in Actions Speak Louder than Nerds](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/09/TELEMMGLPICT000345277562_16915831882320_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberWd9EgFPZtcLiMQf0Rf_Wk3V23H2268P_XkPxc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: “I’m not a comedian,” Tom Crosbie says.“I’m not a juggler, I’m not a burlesque act…” He’s no magician, either, but his feats would give Derren Brown a run for his money.
A self-effacing figure in his glasses and cardigan, what Crosbie is, he clarifies, is “a nerd” – one with breathtaking powers of memory. For an hour, while soothing background Muzak plays, he does one impossible thing after another.
He knows Shakespeare’s plays word-for-word, reciting any bit on command. He’s memorised thousands of shows in the Yellow Pages-sized 2023 Fringe programme; give him a page-number, he’ll tell you what’s on it. And so on. When he occasionally slips up, it perversely makes the whole act more impressive, by revealing the graft that’s gone into it.
Crosbie has a superhuman knack for Rubik’s cubes, too; he solves them one-handed, behind his back, in the blink of an eye, all while keeping up his fast-paced patter with the crowd. This is a show for all ages, and brought out my inner child’s sense of wonder: one routine made me involuntarily cry out “no!” in sheer incredulity.
It takes a while to warm up, though. Crosbie shares a video-diary of his year which should really have been kept to his Facebook friends, and his jokes are only gently amusing. The show-closing tribute to cosmologist and king-of-nerds Carl Sagan veers close to sentimental schmaltz, but it had me misty-eyed all the same. Crosbie doesn’t explicitly draw a link between his feats and space exploration, but it’s there if you want to find one. Why learn to do all this dazzling, pointless stuff? For the same reasons we send rockets into deep space: out of curiosity, for the beauty of it, to prove what humans can do. TFS
Tickets: 0131 622 6552; gildedballoon.co.uk
Lorna Rose Treen: Skin Pigeon ★★★★★
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (The Attic)
When: 4.35pm (extra show at 11.15pm on Aug 20)
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![Lorna Rose Treen is in Skin Pigeon at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/09/TELEMMGLPICT000343914241_16915827877870_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJ4eGk7y7RkP9yV7bRNs2Xqne3CB2vM1akl5BG6pZjZo.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Judging last year’s 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 has now 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
Tickets: 020 7609 1800; edfringe.com
Amusements by Ikechukwu Ufomadu ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Two)
When: 5.40pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 16)
![Ikechukwu Ufomadu performs in Amusements at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000345211879_16915064922060_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJ4eGk7y7RkP9yV7bRNs2XsUWaPIL6EwXkM4pEaoLDQI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: “My name is, uh…” Ikechukwu Ufomadu consults his notes, frowns, slowly pulls his reading-glasses from his tuxedo pocket – they break – holds up what’s left of them like a lorgnette, and finally consults his notes again. “My name is Ikechukwu Oo-foomadoo? I do hope I’m pronouncing that correctly.”
It’s a droll introduction to a fresh, funny act, at once very clever and very silly. The Emmy-nominated US comic plays a man out of time, a raconteur from nowhere. Proudly “born and raised right here in the northern hemisphere”, he casually remembers what he was up to in the 70s, or the 60s, or possibly the 50s. Nixon was around, he knows that much at least.
“Ike” Ufomadu’s persona is a satire on all-American insincerity, with the shallow charm and hollow chuckle of anyone who’s tried to be all things to all people, only to end up becoming no one. We’re never given a glimpse behind the mask, and this show is all the better for it.
He’s part mid-century lounge act, part politician on the campaign trail, slipping into impressions of JFK and FDR mid-sentence, or over-enunciating in a languid, rich voice. He croons the alphabet song like an AI-generated Frank Sinatra, and recites a sonnet by Shakespeare (“widely regarded as the Shakespeare of his day”) while somehow hilariously mangling every word. (The show’s finale, which gives us more Shakespeare to diminishing returns, is the only bum note.)
His gags are a mix of offbeat one-liners (“ageing has added years to my life”) and a kind of contentless anti-comedy, lessons in speaking beautifully without ever saying anything at all. “I understand that many of you present are here tonight. By a show of hands, who’s here?”
In the timeless words of Dwight D Eisenhower’s campaign manager: I like Ike. TFS
Tickets: 0131 556 6550; pleasance.co.uk
Lachlan Werner – Voices Of Evil ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (The Cellar)
When: 10.30pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 15 or 23)
![Lachlan Werner in Voices of Evil](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000345211877_16915066373930_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqskTk5DlCpGZkDMRo1CxemGQnZJIETfWB_fUbKb77n0w.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: A terrifically talented young chap, Lachlan Werner might be the funniest new ventriloquist on the block since Nina Conti. Dressed as a choirboy, his face a rictus of fear caked in greasepaint, he here plays a nervous virgin who’s been chosen as a blood-sacrifice by a witch (a shrill puppet on the end of his arm, who banters wickedly with the crowd). Once her satanic ritual goes wrong – spoilers! – things take a kinky twist, as the boy discovers he rather likes having a big, strong demon up inside him. Ooh-er. Celebratory coming-out shows are ten a penny at the Fringe, but I’ve never seen one quite like this before. The second half’s possession routine isn’t quite so giddily funny as the devilishly clever ventriloquism of the opening – we miss the witch whenever she’s offstage – but this is still one hell of a debut. TFS
Tickets: 0131 556 6550; pleasance.co.uk
Stewart Lee: Basic Lee ★★★★☆
Where: The Stand’s New Town Theatre (Grand Hall)
When: 1.50pm (extra shows at 9.20pm on Aug 12-14)
Until: Aug 20
![Stewart Lee: Basic Lee is at The Stand's New Town Theatre until Aug 20](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000310845480_16918622026270_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqtGQB12KHxxQCrwnTZkX0nwgWqwm85JEWpGVhFb46TTg.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Is Stewart Lee going soft? After decades of audience-baiting aloofness and mock-froideur, he now actually seems to be enjoying himself. Basic Lee is, he tells us, his attempt to return to the basic elements of pure, simple stand-up: “One person, one microphone, and, if you’re Frankie Boyle, a large team of uncredited writers.”
Of course, Lee is never that simple. He’s up to all his usual self-sabotaging tricks: slow, excruciating repetition (he can still be glacial in pace, if not in temperament); jibes at his fans, reviewers and fellow comics; digressions that loop back to the starting point when you least expect it. But compared with his last tour, the precision-tooled double bill Snowflake/Tornado, there’s a looseness to it, which is no bad thing. He’s left himself space to play in, room for spur-of-the-moment riffing. Basically, even Basic Lee is better than most. TFS Reviewed at the Leicester Square Theatre, London, in 2022
Tickets: 0131 558 9005; thestand.co.uk
Frank Skinner: 30 Years of Dirt ★★★★☆
Where: Assembly George Square (Gordon Aikman Theatre); extra shows 10.20pm at Assembly Hall (Main Hall) on Aug 12 & 19
When: 8.50pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 9, 16, 23)
![Frank Skinner is performing 30 Years of Dirt at Assembly George Square](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000343755936_16915079062940_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqNw2PrAqdrYOrQoh0l53D8urY7T6cn6uRPoddFei6uDE.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: At 66, it’s as if Frank Skinner is groping his way into a post-mainstream phase (and there are a few self-deprecating remarks about his status) where he’s allowing himself a few more rounds of the stock-in-trade smut that propelled him to the top, but hasn’t determined an equivalently defining focal point going forward.
If you were being harsh, you’d say that much of the material doesn’t set the world on fire. And yet right now perhaps the world is sufficiently on fire as it is. The gentle laughs keep coming, his laid-back manner conversationally engaging: whether it be relaying an embarrassing anecdote involving the lyricist Tim Rice, a sudden dark quip about the Princess of Wales, or a well-executed verbal gag about Roget’s Thesaurus. DC
Tickets: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Ian Smith: Crushing ★★★☆☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron)
When: 1.35pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 14)
![Ian Smith in Crushing at the Tron](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000345211876_16915067846230_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqwq5jmZGTbmOb0nVkCES9s1Yi8a9DVXgmEgtyz7c_4eI.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Goole’s finest export, Ian Smith is newly single and (he tells us) determinedly not talking about it. Perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also been feeling very stressed. When his dentist warned him he was grinding his teeth in his sleep and prescribed relaxation, Smith furiously set about trying to relax as quickly and aggressively as possible, by, among other things, driving a tank over a car in Bratislava.
His tales of failed R&R make for an uneven hour, with a few too many anecdotes hinging on people soiling themselves. But Smith’s an eminently likeable act, fully on the crowd’s wavelength (even sitting down among them at one point), and his flabbergasted delivery creates laughs where other comics couldn’t. There are enough strong routines to make Crushing worth catching; one about floating around in a sensory deprivation tank like “a sentient puddle” is worth the ticket-price alone. TFS
Tickets: 0131 226 0026; edfringe.com
Jordan Gray: Is it a Bird? ★★★★
Where: Assembly Rooms (Music Hall)
When: 7.55pm
Dates: Aug 23-24 only
![Jordan Gray: Is it a Bird? returns to the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/12/TELEMMGLPICT000314061141_16918623403380_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqZgEkZX3M936N5BQK4Va8Rf4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: With the beehive of Amy Winehouse, the musical comedy chops of Tim Minchin , and the irrepressible Essex cheek of a young Russell Brand, Jordan Gray had one of the breakthrough hits of the 2022 Fringe with Is It A Bird? That title neatly ties together the show’s two themes: superheroes, and being a transgender woman. Gray brings megawatt charisma – and knowingly outsized ego – to a show that ends with a costume change I don’t think I’ll ever forget. She touches on facing prejudice for who she is, but never for a second asks for our sympathy. “If I’m going to be a joke, then I might as well be in on it,” she sings, a line that captures the spirit of the hour. Come for the songs, stay for the outrageous crowd-work. (Flirting with a couple in the front row: “Between my top half and my bottom half I have something for both of you – I’m like a sexual Swiss army knife.”) Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s the sound of a star taking flight. TFS Reviewed at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe
Tickets: 0131 623 3030; assemblyfestival.com
Dan Tiernan: Going Under ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 2)
When: 10pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 13)
![Dan Tiernan in Going Under at Monkey Barrel Comedy](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000345212124_16915068151650_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqbK_1UUehATdjjkMr7SzgmXAque-fYz6mBxKG49qjjww.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Dan Tiernan is 27, dyspraxic and gay. The dyspraxia – a developmental condition that affects coordination and movement – has made quitting his job as a dinner lady and moving out for the first time utter, messy chaos; his sexuality has given him an obsession with Royal Marines. Not many people believe he’s gay, he says, but he loves convincing you – the fun elsewhere is picking the truths out of the absurdities as this “extraordinary-faced” Mancunian savagely and gleefully mocks himself and his neurodivergency. (Warning – baked beans are heavily involved.) The show’s quality befits a winner of the 2022 BBC New Comedy Award – it’s furious yet friendly, full of bait and switch, and a thrilling rollercoaster ride when it comes to pacing – particularly by the time we get to the heartfelt ending, whose honesty brings things back to earth with a bang. SL
Tickets: 0131 226 0026; edfringe.com
John Hastings: The Times They Are A John Hastings ★★★★☆
Where: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 2)
When: 8.35pm
Until: Aug 27
![John Hastings in The Times They Are A John Hastings at Monkey Barrel Comedy](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000345212125_16915068486750_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqr9mCRwwDbt1nwdZ9X8c_6UgS7S-ukhk48w-_KmtyACY.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: John Hastings’s craftsmanship here is exquisite; his stories are the kind where the punchlines have punchlines. He’s a 38-year-old Ottawan who flits between the US and the UK, so there’s lots of sending up of cultural mores (Canadian politeness, LA gun culture, Londoner dispassion). But mainly, it’s a snapshot into the life of the divorced elderly millennial – think ankle cramps during sex games and a wry sideways look at anxiety and how he ought to love museums. His delivery of all this is masterful – relaxed and effortless, with seamless segues and lightning-quick wit when it comes to crowd work. It’s as if he’s gone to the Ed Byrne school of stand-up, and sprinkled in more sweat and hangups. Well worth your time. SL
Tickets: 0131 226 0026; edfringe.com
Dominique Salerno: The Box Show ★★★★☆
Where: Pleasance Courtyard (The Cellar)
When: 3pm
Until: Aug 27 (not 16)
![Dominique Salerno in The Box Show at the Pleasance Courtyard](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/comedy/2023/08/08/TELEMMGLPICT000345211885_16915068981280_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqCceMXJtaZGMG8GkK7K3ZQszIdpUn0LXD-GlW6u1rXwA.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In a nutshell: Dominique Salerno thinks outside the box by clambering inside it. A hit in New York in 2016, her inventive one-woman sketch show is performed entirely in a cube too small to stand up in, with four hinged doors that flip open in different combinations. Within that constraint, she creates a stream of clever ideas; a high-school dance where two lovers are seen only from the legs down; a silent Mission: Impossible spoof; or half a dozen Greek heroes squabbling inside the Trojan horse.
When Salerno she gets her teeth into the right character - a monstrous pop diva, say - she can be terrifically funny. But her delivery is more theatre-schoolish than naturally funny-boned, and a couple of skits run overlong, petering out without a punchline. Still, if some scenes work better as theatrical vignettes than outright comedy, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The most memorable one in the show, about a lonely 60-foot giantess, is a delicately performed routine that begins as a joke before swerving into real, heartstring-tugging pathos. “You know what it’s like to wish for less of yourself?” the giantess asked, and I felt a lump in my throat. TFS
Tickets: 0131 556 6550; pleasance.co.uk