Pleasance Courtyard

Iraqi-Brummie Al-Habib scored great notices with the funny, slick musings of last year’s debut Fringe hour Death to the West (Midlands), a coming of age-style set about growing up with Iraqi heritage during Iraq War-era Britain, and also about being from Birmingham. For his second show he promises to offer something ‘more relatable for white British people’ – Stuck in the Middle (East) With You is about growing up as a child of divorce, though from the title one imagines his heritage will come into miore than a smidge.

Even by the fairly vague naming conventions of stand up comedy shows, it’s hard to imagine what sardonic Anglo-Russian Olga Koch’s new show Fat Tom Cruise will be about. Apparently it revolves around a story Koch has to tell. And furthermore, it’s a genre-defying show with immersive elements. In the world of solo stand-up shows this could mean everything or nothing, but Koch is an undoubtable pro and if she’s stretching her wings a bit formally then so much the better.

Following last year’s fine character comedy-based Edinburgh debut Pathetic Little Characters, young comic Rory Marshall turns his hand to something a little more autobiographical with Thank You for the Opportunity, a show exploring the fact that the still youthful comedian has had an astonishing 26 jobs. As much as being a series of funy anecdotes, it’s also an exploration of the world of work and the people one meets in it.

Larry Dean is the workhorse of Saturday Night Live UK: the Glaswegian comic didn’t necessarily get the kudos of the show’s breakout stars like George Fouracres or Jack Shep, or his younger fellow stand-ups Ania Magliano and Paddy Young. But in season one he performed in more sketches than anybody else, and if you didn’t notice then that’s because he’s a chameleonic presence, his astonishing command of accents making him an invaluable supporting player.  It’s also somewhat unfair to invoke SNL when he’s been a big deal in Scotland in particular for over a decade: certainly he’s playing the biggest room at the Fringe this year of anyone from the show.  A set of old school observational raconteurism And it’s a very pleasant hour of comedy, albeit one that feels summed up by Dean’s late confession that he gave the show the title Hellbent because he was expecting there to be more fractiousness around his recent wedding to his now husband than was in fact the case. The large contingent of Catholics and small delegation of Iranians at the wedding had a lovely time, apparently. Instead the show is framed around his relationship with his autistic, Black County-accented husband - from meeting to marriage - and is essentially a set of old school observational raconteurism.  It’s all very agreeable, elevated by Dean’s gift for accents. He never quite makes it his main thing, but he’s incredibly deft with it: his bit on the two types of Americans had me snorting. Ultimately, though,...

Conceptual comic Joseph Morpurgo hasn’t been totally absent this last 10 years: he recently brought back his classic 2015 show Soothing Sounds for Baby. However, Highlander 70 is his first new work in nearly a decade although you’d hardly guess it if you didn’t know: he throws himself into a show with truly esoteric subject matter with the breezy energy of a man who pumps out a weirdy Fringe show a year. And although he’s not an observational stand-up type who was going to talk us through what he’s been up to, there’s just something admirably ballsy about announcing his return with this. Wearing clay-coloured face paint for whatever reason, he dives straight into the premise. He allegedly randomly happened across a 1970 high school yearbook for a US high school called Highlander Academy, in New Jersey. And from the pictures contained therein he spins an eccentric and amusing yarn about David Moon, a student who appears multiple times in the book. Of course Murpurgo has no real idea who Moon was. But he has crafted a narrative that Moon sits at the heart of, when a private diary detailing the straitlaced student’s love for the most popular girl in school goes missing on graduation day, prompting an epic quest to retrieve it.  I would assume that somehow Morpurgo did happen upon the real yearbook – it seems like too mad a thing to have entirely fabricated – but clearly the wild stories he tells of David and his adventures are not true, from the mildly terrifying audience...

Produced by Edinburgh Fringe hitmeister Francesca Moody, The Scaring sees sketch trio Crybabies follow up their very silly sci-fi Bagbeard and absurdist World War 2 show Danger Brigade with what you could probably have correctly guessed to be a rummage around the horror genre. The series of sketches that comprise The Scaring follow a former priest who must team up with a ghost after peril strikes at a creepy hotel.

I really loved Frankie Thompson’s previous Fringe shows Catts and Body Show (the latter made in collaboration with Liv Ello). Both of them were out-there satirical collages of video and voice recordings in which Thompson came across like a clown-world Adam Curtis, with her performance revolving around her dramatically lip syncing to the piece while serving a series of comical, otherworldly looks.  I suppose they gave the impression that Thompson was a gifted but vulnerable Gen Z savant, who barely spoke at all using her own voice: performing, but also hiding behind the recorded audio visuals. While aspects of new show Horrible Things remain distinctly Frankie Thompson – she still lipsyncs to a load of esoteric recordings, she still seems very irritated by the Tories – she now has a voice of her own. Quite a loud one too: clad in a polkadot gown, her persona is as a posh, slightly eccentric despot (think Queenie from Blackadder) who commands the room with a withering imperiousness, pulling faces of pure horror any time anyone threatens to interact with her.  She also vomits a lot. Nothing health and safety need to worry about, but with every dry heave another horrible thing is cued up. Some are nauseating: that recording of a freaky nine-year-old Jacob Reese Mogg you’ve probably heard before; a 1995 interview with the Tory whips office intimating that they’ve smoothed over instances of child rape; Cliff Richard. There is much less video than the previous shows, but each...

I don’t think Andrew Doherty wishes death upon any theatre critics. He certainly didn’t kill me when I came to see his new show. Still, I do think he was genuinely upset by the so-so reception given to last year’s Sad Gay Aids Play – a marked contrast to his roundly-hailed debut Gay Witch Sex Cult – and has explored his hurt feelings in quite spectacularly entertaining way with third show Reviewers Welcome… TO DIE!  It is, on one level, incredibly childish. Continuing the horror-comedy streak of Doherty’s previous work, it’s basically a supernatural revenge fantasy about a venal, conceited nepo baby theatre critic named Felix Chatelier being punished by supernatural forces for daring to give Sad Gay Aids Play three stars. Critics make for fun punchbags. But it is, of course, absurd that anyone would make this much fuss about a three-star review and the author is well aware of this. The thin-skinned Doherty of Reviewers Welcome is as much an exaggerated persona as the weaselly sell-out of Sad Gay Aids Play.  As the feckless Chatelier is lured out to the desolate, Lovecraftian East Midlands town of Billington, he in fact becomes marginally more sympathetic as he tries to unravel the demonic mystery that haunts the place. Meanwhile ‘Andrew Doherty’ is introduced as a tall, handsome, gruff, hugely successful playwright who never reads his reviews and who everyone loves and admires to an absurd degree.  It is funny because it’s so gloriously petty, because Doherty is mocking...

Ahir Shah is obviously a very good comedian: his last show, Ends,was famously so good that it came to the 2023 Fringe as a work-in-progress, was rapidly upgraded to finished show and then won that year’s main Comedy Award. Follow-up Golden is of course very funny, a mediation on getting older and settling down in which Shah mines some sharp, oft-idiosyncratic laughs from buying a flat, getting married, and the amusement that comes from being a total (probably) autistic mess of neuroses and depression and being in a relationship with a woman who is almost comically ‘normal’. But is it reasonable to say that Shah is moving slightly away from comedy with Golden, a show whose heart lies in impassioned rants about family, mortality, the state of the British state and I guess maybe you could say the meaning of life?  I mean it’s hard to unequivocally say ‘Ahir Shah is aiming to be less funny now’ when it may be that Golden will eventually take on a more amusing final form. But the version I saw was certainly unafraid not to be serious. This sounds like I’m damning what with faint praise. But for the most part I found the most impassioned moments – including a new ending he wrote shortly before the run started, for reasons you’ll discover – absolutely sublime. Some of this stuff is in terms of subject matter not a million miles away from Peter Kay. But while Kay’s musings on family etcetera are, ah, what they are, Shah’s anguished, erudite screeds are utterly hypnotic - again and...

This boisterous kids' show is the little sibling to improv hit musical Showstopper! The Improvised Musical (also running at the Fringe). The performers use suggestions from the audience to power a completely improvised, song-filled hour of very silly musical fun indeed. The fact they’ll take any suggestion no matter how daft is mana to little ones’ imaginations.