Category: Stand-up Comedy

  • Creep

    4 stars – A hilarious lowdown of creepy screenshots. One of the hottest Fringe shows this year – a fully sold out run with newly added dates gone before you blink twice – is a one-woman piece by Harriet Richardson, a multidisciplinary performance artist, who opens by humbly admitting she’s not a comedian nor an…

  • Exquisite Corpse

    4 stars – Chaotic good character comedy. Jonathan Oldfield’s Exquisite Corpse is a jam-packed, late-night underground character comedy show (the time and venue do work in its favour) that technically runs for an hour but feels like 20 minutes.

  • Mario Adrion: Live a Little

    4 stars – ‘it makes you laugh but also think’ Mario Adrion has a fully sold-out Edinburgh run, and by the cheering at his entrance on stage it was pretty obvious that he has a fandom, not only an audience (pretty privilege? He’s doing it the right way). I also knew him from the socials,…

  • Inside and Prejudice

    2 stars – engaging but unripe How does a girl from a Pakistani family but born and raised in Scotland see the world? Ifrah Qureshi provides some answers to this question in her solo show, her first attempt at long-form stand-up comedy.

  • My Therapist is Dying

    Ashley Gavin is iconic. In the past weeks, her show My Therapist is Dying guaranteed her a sold-out Fringe run. As the title promises, it is a bittersweet performance, even though the jokes are fast-paced and flowing almost uninterrupted.

  • Hairy Situation

    5 stars – prophetess of hope ALOK Vaid-Menon’s stage figure is modest and calm. In Hairy Situation, stories and jokes are drawn from various sources of inspiration and touch a series of themes, from the setting of the performance itself, to uncomfortable moments from their life, to eventually land on the topic of body hair.

  • Dead Inside

    4 stars – powerful and honest musical comedy. Ah, the power of women…! Women falling on the ground, bouncing back up, falling more, bouncing back again and then some. Such is Riki Lindhome’s story, her infertility journey, as she calls it with apparent irony, standing somewhere between theatrical storytelling and comedy.

  • An Ecstatic Display

    3 stars – vulnerable, honest and ecletic. Jessie Cave, a well-versed, deadpan and brutally open comic, delivers another hour of just that: her usual dry, raw, personal, dark comedy. She’s famous for it by now, and not only for her comedy, podcasting, acting and bestselling novel, but also thanks to her public, on-off-on-again relationship with…

  • Think Better: Manifesting Money, Real Estate and Hot People

    3 stars – a silly take on manifestation and self-help culture. No matter how much we try to avoid it, we’re living in an age of constant incoming stream of spiritual and relationship advice, self-help, self-love and pop-psychology coming at us particularly from our (broken beyond repair!) Instagram and TikTok algorithms. Manifestation is one of…

  • Zoe Brownstone: A Bite of Yours

    3 stars – the jokes might have been written but they weren’t delivered The Canadian comedian Zoe Brownstone presents us with a hour-long collection of jokes and anecdotes covering her desire for a 90’s rom-com style meet-cutes, her Jewishness, her drug-selling past, getting deported from the Netherlands after her Dutch (meet-cute!) boyfriend quickly dumps her,…