Monkey Barrel Comedy

A slightly hubristic name to give your show at the world’s biggest comedy festival, and one imagines there’s a fair degree of irony in its deployment. But Daran ‘Jonno’ Johnson has earned the name as he finally makes his solo Fringe debut 16 years after his sublimely silly, gloriously high concept sketch troupe Sheeps make theirs. He’s also riding high as head writer for SNL UK, whose somewhat unexpected success this year has boosted a host of its stars and should hopefully do the same for its behind the scenes talent. We’re promised ‘a joyful, gag-heavy hour packed with whimsical, odd tangents and nonsensical comedy’.

Paddy Young is annoyingly handsome and has one of the best gigs in British comedy, being the co-anchor of SNL UK’s Weekend Update.  So you’d think a stand-up show bemoaning that he’s a permanently single loser might not entirely convince. But no, he’s all good: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? kicks off with a joke so kamikaze inappropriate that you have to think there’s a vague chance of it escaping isolation and screwing up his career. So probably best not share it here. Young’s surreal, somewhat poetic set paints him as an arch oddball whose singledom can be attributed to weirdness, moroseness and an inability to comprehend the rules of life in general. He obsesses over the first girl he kissed, reasoning she is the answer to his funk, tracking her down to Copenhagen and planning to fly out to see her; he dates a group of 30 men (called ‘the lads’) all at once, a logistical nightmare; he stews over his housemate’s greater romantic success and takes petty solace in the fact he has the better hair of the two. I would say most of this is very definitely made up, but Young’s stand-up has its own weird artificial gravity that kind of means that even if you don’t believe what he’s saying to, you know what he means: the man we see before us is a massive loser, or at least he is for the purposes of the show. And reality and tall tales are amusingly blurred – I don’t believe Young dated 30 men at once but I do believe he injured his hand in a freak accident with a samurai sword...

Ania Magliano could probably tell you that you had five minutes left to live with a sense of gossipy intimacy that would make you chuckle naughtily. So it’s no wonder that in her latest show Peach Fuzz she pulls off chatting about a sense of disassociation from her own body with a casual breeziness that suggests it is absolutely no big deal – or at least, that we should just sit back and enjoy the ride.  And maybe it’s not a big deal. You have to think that the still-youthful stand-up – she’s 28 now, having made her Fringe debut at 24 – has presumably suffered somewhat though processing this stuff before transmuting it into lols. But crucially you now get the impression it is all duly processed. From a highly amusing bit of patter at the start where she dissects the slightly bewildering outfit she’s wearing and the reasons why we might be bewildered by it, to a (literally) climactic sequence detailing an unusual experience in a sensory deprivation tank, her gift is to reel off what would feel like sensitive confessions in other hands as if they were a choice bit of goss that she was so amused by she couldn’t wait to share it.  To some extent her persona remains that of the self-absorbed Gen Z princess: the sequence where she talks about Winston Churchill and claims not to really know who he is feels like she’s laying it on a bit (though it has a very funny payoff). On the whole, though, the exquisitely wrought stories of her own blithe self-obsession that peppered her...

The relative downgrade in the wellbeing of Western civilzation is liable to be bad for Nish Kumar’s mental health – the political comic gives the impression of taking every one of Trump’s depravities personally – but good for his audience: his mill is overflowing with grist. Expect darkly amusing dissection of the news, delivered by a man who gives every impression of being on the cusp of either a panic attack or combustuing from fury or possibly both. These Edinburgh dates are billed as work-in-progress, but given he launches straight into a national tour in September expect it to be slick as it’s ever going to be come the end of this run.

If the advent of Saturday Night Live UK has offered an Edinburgh Fringe boost for the stars of the show performing here then it’s also offered a calling care to SNL UK’s legion of writers – many of them terrific stand-ups who presumably came close to being included in the performing line-up but there was simply no room for them. One suspects Bella Hull would have been a shoo in if the ‘acerbic female Gen Z stand-up’ slot wasn’t comprehensively filled already by the more famous Ania Magliano, but the volume of press and profiles that have greeted Hull’s latest set suggest she’s waiting in the wings if a vacancy comes up. Who cares if she’s a mean girl when the jokes are this funny? Her schtick on Mad Cow Disease is relentlessly ironic, relentlessly acidic and extremely funny. She wields withering disdain like a samurai with a sword and clearly lies as easily as she breathes, with an opening routine that ends with as spectacularly stone-cold piece of rug-pulling as I’ve ever seen in a comedy show. I’ve no doubt she mines her real life for inspiration: it is not unbelievable that she spent 2025 single; her whole extremely amusing reminiscence about having a chaotic upbringing being raised by her mum and grandma would surely be too random to have made up. But she applies a zingy, lightly poisonous filter to everything – a sequence where she is gratuitously horrible about her flatmate is funny precisely because it’s so wildly over the top. I guess the underpinning assumption...