sat 09/08/2025

standup comedy

Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Lily Phillips / Ayoade Bamgboye

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...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Jacob Nussey / Phil Green

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...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Rob Auton / Saaniya Abbas

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...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Monstering the Rocketman by Henry Naylor / Alex Berr

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...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Alison Spittle / Christopher Macarthur-Boyd

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...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Rhys Darby / Alex Stringer

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...

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Eddie Pepitone, Special review - return of the curmudgeon

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...

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Summer Laugh review - five comics gear up for the Fringe

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,...

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Kieran Hodgson, Soho Theatre review - a love affair soured by Trump

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...

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Sarah Silverman, Netflix Special review - finding the funny in losing a parent

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...

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Dara Ó Briain, Soho Theatre Walthamstow review - master storyteller spins a family yarn

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...

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Zoe Lyons, Touring - midlife, without the crisis

Zoe Lyons knows her audience; as a few shoutouts confirmed, many of them are long-time fans, and have had lives with similar highs and lows along the way, and she delivers stories about her life that reflect theirs too. And so it proves with her...

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