Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015: comedy reviews

Joe Kent-Waters’s second show is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is to say that it’s basically a bigger budget remake of his first show.  In case you missed it, Kent-Waters made a huge impression at last year’s Fringe – winning the Best Newcomer award – with his creation Frankie Monroe, a hulking, gravelly-voiced, white-faced men’s club owner and self-declared ‘biggest bastard in Yorkshire’. The improbable longevity of his anachronistic Rotherham working men’s club was the result of a pact Frankie had signed with the Devil 25 years previously – and in debut show Joe-Kent Waters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! the Devil came to collect, the show culminating in him being dragged to Hell, ‘by the balls’. Joe Kent-Waters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) is the direct sequel: it begins in Hell, where Frankie is essentially practising almost exactly the same schtick to the souls of the damned as he was to the men of Rotherham (who I’m sure are two very different groups of people). The jokes are different, but it’s the same character doing the same shtick in a similar way – an audience member is picked on to a remarkable extent; a puppet dog is deployed. And it’s brilliant, the best show I’ve seen at the Fringe this year. Sometimes it’s death to return to what you did last time out, but it was exactly the right decision for Kent-Waters. Most crucially, the joke is still funny. Frankie – a sort of monstrous amalgam of Brian Potter and Papa Lazaru – remains a wonderful...

I’m basically a theatre critic who occasionally inflicts himself on comedy shows, and I have to say what really impressed me about Nish Kumar’s new show was his diction. Probably the country’s most mainstream overtly leftwing comic, Nish, Don’t Kill My Vibe is a bit like being run over by a freight train. He doesn’t ease us into a concept or anything, he just mentions that he’s toured this show to the US and that friends asked him what it was like out there and then he ‘discusses’ the current state of America in a tone that strongly suggests he’s having a rage induced panic attack. The funniest thing about the title is that it’s never explained because it doesn’t need to be explained. The show is very loud, very fast, and there was nary a moment in which I didn’t feel concerned about his wellbeing. And yet the man truly does have terrific diction: shouting at full volume and breakneck pace, not a syllable is lost.  Even though one of the many anxieties Kumar expresses throughout is that he doesn’t really have ‘an act’ and this is just what he’s like all the time, this is clearly not entirely true. You can view him as a sort of anti-Stewart Lee, eschewing all structural trickery in favour of blurting out his panicked inner monologue at deafening volume. But of course his rants are tightly structured, and frankly the sheer stamina needed to deliver them is impressive. Plus you can’t be the anti-Stewart Lee when you both have routines about how awful you think Ricky Gervais...

I promise I won’t go on about this too much, but I think I may have been responsible for The Sun’s bizarre 2023 attack on Lorna Rose Treen, in which the tabloid accused the rising sketch star of killing comedy with ‘wokery’. I was on the panel for the Dave Joke of the Fringe award that year, and I nominated Treen’s harmless – and by no stretch of the imagination woke – gag that won that year’s award (it revolved around ‘cheetah’ and ‘cheater’ being homophones). So unless another panellist also nominated it then that was me - sorry Lorna! This isn’t simply a flex because Treen has a new show, but because within a few minutes of it starting she very amusingly breaks with its Americana theme to address the Sun ‘incident’ – she has the article printed out to show us – and to declare that her intent this time is to kill theatre as well. 24 Hour Diner People isn’t really a theatre show, but it’s certainly notably higher concept than its predecessor Skin Pigeon. It follows a series of oddball characters at a quintessentially American diner – possibly at some point in the ‘80s – with Treen playing most roles and audience members being dragooned in to tackle the rest.  It is a huge amount of fun, in large part for the same reason Skin Pigeon was: Treen tackles the bizarre series of characters – from our daydreaming waitress host to a trucker with really long arms to a bizarrely kinky schoolgirl – with total conviction, and a palpable fondness for the world she’s referencing. With...

Andrew Doherty’s idiosyncratic folk horror comedy Gay Witch Sex Cult was one of the most arresting stand up debuts at last year’s Fringe. And its follow up Sad Gay AIDS Play is a lot of fun. But it also sails into tropier waters than its predecessor, and though hardly a run of the mill stand up show, it does feel like it’s treading on some pretty well worn ground. Doherty again plays a preeningly precious and self-regarding version of himself, now attempting to write a follow up to last year’s hit. Unfortunately his wealthy parents are refusing to bankroll him this time, so he’s turned to the Arts Council England, who have no interest in the creepy Six-esque musical he wants to write. But upon hearing he’s gay, ACE suggests in the strongest possible terms that he write a play about AIDS. Doherty goes about all this very amusingly, and his secret weapon is his own stage persona. Weasley, brittle and self justifying, making art for all the wrong reasons, secure in the knowledge that mummy and daddy’s money will bail him out if things go south - it’s depressingly but hilariously acute satire. But a bad taste play about AIDS? In 2025? Really? Team America’s ‘Everyone Has AIDS’ was 21 years ago and it’s decades on from the flowering of the great AIDS related dramas. It’s an absurdly anachronistic provocation – a handful of off-colour jokes about The Troubles feel edgier. Likewise the bit where he throws in a scene about a simple working class lad from Newcastle because ACE...

The curiously terse title Relay seems calibrated to deflect from the fact that this is the second solo Fringe show from Welsh comic Leila Navabi, whose 2023 debut Composition was billed in the more traditional way of having her name next to it in the title. Not that she’s hiding her involvement, more that she seems to be determinedly pushing the ‘theatre’ side of a somewhat generically ambiguous storytelling show that’s co-produced by Sherman Theatre.  I raise this because on the performance I saw it was the more traditional stand-up style bits at the beginning where Navabi seemed to struggle – the audience was supportive but she didn’t quite seem to know how to work them; she needs a bit more confidence in her material. I think she was thrown by the fact she began proceedings by accidentally falling into a bank of chairs, which was obviously unfortunate but also fundamentally amusing and surely something she could have had fun with. But if the sense of nervousness never quite abates, it certainly diminishes, and Relay is basically lovely.  The Elan Isaac-directed show concerns Navabi and her partner – also a ‘brown’ female Welsh stand-up – and Navabi’s account of their efforts to conceive, a process that involved spending a lot of money at a fertility clinic before concluding they had no choice but to go for a rather more budget, rather more DIY option. With a melodica strapped around her neck for virtually the entire show, Navabi delivers this as a mix of wryly...

Ultra-nerdy standup Kieran Hodgson – a man who once did an entire hour about the 1975 European referendum – recently had a cameo role in notorious superhero flop The Flash. In fact he spoke the first line in the movie. This is so prodigiously improbable that it’s no wonder it’s the jumping off point for his new show, Voice of America.  In fact the very English Hodgson makes relatively little hay out of his turn as the character dubbed Sandwich Guy, the drawling American barista who opens the doomed Ezra Miller flicks. Of course he talks about it a lot, and is as bemused as anyone that it happened. But there’s no behind-the-scenes goss or analysis of the film itself. Rather, some initial feedback over the quality of his accent is used as a jumping off point to explore his relationship with America as a whole. To a certain extent the point of Hodgson’s unswervingly high concept stand-up shows is that they’re not especially relatable: he’s an intensely warm and likeable performer, but he pursues odd obsessions, in an eccentric manner. His last, Made in Scotland, followed his relocation to Glasgow and his attempt to immerse himself in Scottish culture and language to such a ludicrous degree that it seemed calculated to wind up anyone Scottish in the audience (which is quite a lot of people at the Edinburgh Fringe). Voice of America, though, is very relatable: it’s about the complicated relationship we all have with the US, a country that we tend to be drawn to in our youths...

The flagship venue of legendary Scottish comedy promoter Tommy Sheppard (who also counts the Glasgow, Fife and Falkirk comedy festivals, the Assembly Rooms Fringe venue and two other Stand branches, in Glasgow and Newcastle, among his interests), The Stand Edinburgh is quite simply the king of comedy venues in Scotland’s capital. Its poky wee stage (no bigger than your average Travelodge shower stall) has been graced by the great and good of UK and international comedy – stories still abound of that time Johnny Vegas hijacked an industrial floor buffer for his act, while alt.comedy stars Stewart Lee, Bridget Christie, Simon Munnery and Daniel Kitson all still make regular sojourns here. Local heroes visit frequently as well – Kevin Bridges and Frankie Boyle drop by whenever they have new material to workshop, be it at purpose-booked engagements or as surprise guests at the weekly Red Raw new talent night (where old hands polish new jokes as complete novices step up for the first time). What impresses about The Stand is how, having ticked all the boxes that make it a great live comedy venue, it’s gone on to be a superlative bar as well. The beers on tap include the usual mainstream suspects (Heineken, Fosters), but also feature the locally made (and cherished) Three Hop lager. The food – nachos, burgers and other pub grub favourites – is of a higher standard than that at many nearby joints where the menu is a main feature rather than an optional extra. And the atmosphere –...