Comedy
Veronica Lee
Lily Phillips, Monkey Barrel ★★★★Lily Phillips is keen to tell us at the top of her show that she’s not that Lily Phillips. There’s no OnlyFans content in Crying but, dealing as it does with her experience of having a baby, it’s graphic in a different way. So strap in.She tells the story from conception to childbirth and also talks about IVF and being part of a National Childbirth Trust group – or a “diverse group of white, middle-class women”, as the comic drily describes it.It takes real skill to tell a personal story like this and keep everyone, male and female, parents and non- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jacob Nussey, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Write about what you know, comics are told, and in Primed – his Fringe debut – Jacob Nussey does just that. He describes to great comic effect what it was like in the three years he worked in an Amazon warehouse.It’s not as bad as everyone thinks, he says, but his descriptions suggest otherwise, delivered though they are with a generous dollop of gags and smart observations.He paints a vivid picture of his time there, of his colleagues and how they enacted their revenge for the boredom and dead end nature of the work. Although, he says, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rob Auton, Assembly Roxy ★★★★ The stage is littered with 30-odd large white cards bearing words such as “love”, “believe” and “push”. Rob Auton comes on stage and tells us he’s CAN, a former motivational speaker, and in the following 60 minutes of CAN (An Hour-Long Story) we hear his tale.As ever with Auton, he draws us in, peppering the story with lots of clever gags and asides, and even the odd groaner. His shows are mix of performance poetry, spoken word and storytelling, and he has a knack of looking at things from a different angle, prompting us to look at things anew.For Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor, Pleasance Dome ★★★★Henry Naylor doesn’t hold back in his latest Fringe offering, an entertaining monologue in which he examines The Sun’s treatment of Elton John in the 1980s, an era when tabloids reigned supreme in the UK media – and trust in them started to erode.Against an onstage projection of screaming tabloid headlines from the era, Naylor tells the tale through the eyes of a keen young reporter hoping to make his mark in his first week at The Sun, then edited by the abrasive Kelvin MacKenzie – “The most foul-mouthed man in Britain” as Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alison Spittle, Monkey Barrel ★★★Alison Spittle is fat, she tells us at the top of the show. But not as fat as she used to be. And that’s the premise of BIG, in which she describes why she has been overweight since she was eight years old and what led to the recent weight loss – “about an XL Bully’s-worth”.The Irish comic talks about the sexual abuse which prompted her weight gain as a child, but this is no misery memoir, as she goes on to talk about body positivity (cue some smart Lizzo and Adele gags), and even the “fat bitch” that punctuates so many everyday exchanges with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhys Darby, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Rhys Darby, the New Zealand actor and comic best known as Murray Hewitt in Flight of the Conchords, is back at the Fringe after nearly a decade away with The Legend Returns.It’s an elaborate tale about the march of AI – “Fuck, that horse has bolted” – which, true to form, he tells with great warmth. There’s a mix of physical comedy, daft voices and impressions (from helicopters to electric cars) and silly storytelling, with a generous flow of gags – verbal, aural and physical – thrown in.The hour takes us on a journey involving tech bros, domestic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There aren’t many comics like Eddie Pepitone any more – the veteran comic’s shtick harks to back an earlier age, pre-suitable for TV and Netflix specials. As the New Yorker says drily in his latest special, The Collapse, he was never going to be considered as a host of either a reality programme full of beautiful people or a smarmy late-night chat show.No, he tells it as it is as he rants and rails against the indignities of getting older, reflects on his career and what irritates him – seemingly most things.He starts the way he means to go on, talking about his Apple Watch and why he loves Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe has long been an expensive gig for comics. But while stand-ups may need only a microphone to ply their wares at the world’s biggest arts festival, the costs they have to bear – among them venue charges, accommodation and marketing – don’t come cheap, and are growing year on year. Many people attending the Fringe are unaware of its financial eco-system – but the majority of performers there are self-funding.So it’s interesting to note the initiative taken by five Scottish or Scotland-based comics to broaden their fanbase. The five – Christopher Macarthur-Boyd Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kieran Hodgson is known to television viewers from Two Doors Down and to online fans for his spoofs of TV dramas; but comedy fans know him best for his high-concept stand-up shows, which draw heavily on his personal life.And so Voice of America, his latest live offering, follows in the same vein, charting as it does his lifelong love affair with America, formed years before he actually set foot in the 50 states.Hodgson runs us through how the attraction came about. Departing from the views of his keenly Europhile teacher parents and their dismissal of “American rubbish” – whether food or Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Death can be a powerful driver for comedy, as countless stand-ups and sitcom writers will affirm, but it has to be sensitively handled. Dark humour can be, forgive the pun, life-affirming, and an excuse for the tears, whether of pain or pleasure, to flow.There’s nothing really dark in Sarah Silverman latest stand-up show PostMortem, her Netflix Special recorded at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and far removed from some of the more shock-value comedy she was once known for.It’s about the deaths, just nine days apart, of her beloved father, Donald (known as Schleppy) and her stepmother Janice Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Dara Ó Briain’s has described his previous show So… Where Were We? – in which he describes his search for his birth mother who gave him up for adoption when he was a baby – as his Philomena, while his latest, Re: Creation, is his version of Elf, in which a grown man travels across the world to find his birth father.It’s a neat joke, but also underlines a difference between the two shows which, while companion pieces, are very different tonally. Where the first had moments of raw emotion, Re: Creation – while also tugging at the heartstrings – feels as if it’s played much Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative talent – more than a decade ago, but he reached a new audience with his appearance as the good guy-goes-bad-then-good-again Nate in the lovely television comedy Ted Lasso.Now’s he’s touring with Mr Swallow: Show Pony. Part-way through, something unexpected happens: Nick Mohammed takes over, while still in the guise of Mr Swallow. It’s a meta moment for sure, and slightly discombobulating, but it allows Mohammed to play with the character-within-a-character guise Read more ...