There are well over a thousand comedy shows playing in Edinburgh this August — which ones are worth seeing? I’m in town all month to look for the funniest, most memorable, most original comics around. Every day we will publish reviews of the best of what I find, from established acts to total newcomers — ranking them according to star rating, from five stars downwards. If you have any recommendations of your own, do please put them in the comments below. I can’t promise to see everything, but top tips are always welcome. Right then … let’s laugh!
In her first show, Natalie Palamides played a woman laying eggs. Her second show addressed sexual consent as she played a manly man with a smeared-on beard and a rubber willy. Now the American comic Natalie Palamides is back after six years, and you’d think her third Fringe show couldn’t raise the strangeness stakes any higher. But no! WEER is a richly inventive, artfully abrasive, joke-heavy parody of a Nineties sitcom in which she plays both lovers at once. Palamides is nothing if not committed to her hard-clowning ideas. One side of her is Christine, a successful lifestyle journalist. Then she spins around to her other profile to become Mark, who claims he’s the grandson of Elmer Fudd. Yes, the cartoon man who hunted Bugs Bunny. Like everything else in WEER, befuddling title included, there will be a payoff. This is rude, charming, clever, unsettling, silly and hugely entertaining stuff.
Michael Burdett was 19 when he saw a 16-year-old George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley playing ska in 1979. A talent scout at the time, he took them and their bandmates to a studio to record four songs — including Rude Boy, the first song Michael and Ridgeley wrote together. Success only came in 1982 as Wham!. Burdett is fond yet forensic as he goes through these early misadventures with these polite, eventually distrustful young men.
Stevie Martin makes clever online millennial-minded sketches that don’t waste a moment. By her own admission, returning to performing live after getting millions of hits for some of her video work is both more rewarding and more challenging. Maybe we don’t always need to know so much of Martin’s anxieties about this, much though she smilingly spins and stretches them for comic effect. Yet Martin slams so many good ideas into this video-heavy hour that any over-cute overthinking is soon washed away by generous, surprising, joyous overthinking.
Mat Ewins is every bit as brilliant as his friend Richard Gadd. Ewins is Mr Showbiz in his gold suit but Mr Anti-Showbiz in his ramshackle informality and cheery fondness for filth, blasphemy, self-destruction.
Crazy guy, crazy title, crazy show — which is to say, I haven’t laughed more at anything this year. Demi Adejuyigbe brings on a back-talking remote-controlled robot as his special guest. He spends an hour threatening to do an onstage backflip, danger be damned.
Dan Tiernan holds the stage with a grinning sense of fun that sometimes slips into roaring mock-aggression. His biggest target is always himself as he makes fun of his appearance, his teen habit of smashing beer cans against his face, his phobias, his just-ousted drug habit.
Ivo Graham’s big new Fringe stand-up show, Grand Designs, is so big that it’s made him ineligible for the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. He is deemed now to have star status.
Ania Magliano is never boring: she has a playful poise about her that smilingly mixes a Simon Amstell-ish post-therapy self-awareness with a knowing daffiness of her own.
There’s a lot to process in this entertainingly unsettling solo debut from the wilder-eyed half of the American comedy-theatre duo Pajama Men. Shenoah Allen takes us through his unconventional childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico — Breaking Bad has it about right, he convinces us.
Back at the Fringe for his first run in almost a decade, Adam Hills starts fabulously but doesn’t follow through.
Emma Sidi tells us about the two children she had in lockdown and her unconventional relationship with the comic Alfie Brown, the father of all four of her children. She is going to touch on the impact of the death of her younger brother Ben. She is going to allude to her inability to make friends, to relax and to let go.
Since it’s five years since Jessie Cave last excavated her emotional life on stage with a harsh yet heart-warming mixture of stand-up, homemade craft and theatrical nous, she vows at the start of this new show to show off several of her skills.
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