#10/10 best $40 i've spent | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

tellthemeerkatsitsfine · 1 month ago

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Okay. This post has been a while in the making. Here is a screenshot of the spreadsheet where I have tracked all 65 shows from the Edinburgh Festival 2024, that I have gotten to experience in one way or another (seeing it live, NextUp streams, etc.). They're sorted by a ranking that I gave them out of 10, though it's actually out of 40 because I couldn't keep myself to just 10 numbers, so I started giving half points, and then quarter points and three-quarter points. But I drew the line there. No further decimals.

The rankings are very subjective, based on how much I enjoyed each show at the time, and may in some cases not line up with what a reasonably objective observer would think. Obviously, because of this, reducing comedy shows to numbered rankings and stars and things is fucking pointless. But on the other hand, I do like putting numbers in spreadsheets, so I've done it anyway.

And here are further thoughts about all 65 of those shows. It is... it's nearly 21,000 words. There or thereabouts, is the word count of this post. It's long, even by my standards. I'm pretty sure it's the longest post I've ever made on Tumblr. It's so long. It's too long. And it's not edited, because fuck that. I spent long enough writing it. So it might be unreadable. I know that lots of my posts are ridden with errors, but usually with the ones I spend more time on I do at least a quick glance to try to catch some, I'm not even bothering here. Sorry about that.

Also, Tumblr formatting appears to have made the whole numbers very large, for reasons I do not understand and cannot be bothered to try to change.

- Nish Kumar – Nish Don’t Kill My Vibe

It’s one of the best stand-up shows I’ve ever seen. I’ve been lucky enough to get to follow this show as it’s progressed over the past year, and it was still officially labelled a WIP in Edinburgh (but a WIP that he’d been developing since the previous fall and for a tour that was about to start, so very well put together for something with that label), I was blown away by how great the initial version was and then he just kept adding more stuff that kept being excellent. It’s a very rare show where I can’t think of a single bit that seemed weak or like filler. On the contrary, he was struggling to squeeze all his great material into only an hour. In the version I saw in Edinburgh, he overran slightly, and talked even faster than his usual breakneck pace, and managed to do almost every bit that’s been in the show all year, and every single part made me laugh.

If I hadn’t seen it the week before, I’d have wondered what part of it was a WIP at all anymore. But I can see he’s still playing with it because he ended on a different routine from the closing routine at the WIP I saw him do in London the previous week (I’m not… I mean… it’s fine, in 2022 I drove 8.5 hours just to see him perform in New York City and then a few months later drove 2 hours to Montreal to see him do that show that I’d already seen, in 2024 I got a two-week trip to London and Edinburgh and saw him twice, I like Nish Kumar a normal amount). I find that sort of thing fascinating, being able to see his workings as he tries to decide what tone of closer he wants to go for, and normally I’d have an opinion on it. But in this case I actually don’t know, they both fit the bill very well in different ways (do you want to close on a sensitive moving anecdote or a furious call to arms?), I just think it’s a shame that he can’t do it all. He’ll have to cut some stuff for the tour show, but I wish he could do a 1.5-hour version just once to film it and have this whole show forever.

His 2022 show, the one I saw live twice in a few months because he kept coming to North America, was one of my favourite stand-up shows ever. I think his 2024 show is even better.

9.75

- David O’Doherty – Ready, Steady, David O’Doherty

I came very close to giving this show a 10, knocked it down to 9.75 because I feel like I shouldn’t be able to give more than one show a perfect score (totally arbitrary rule that I’ve made up), and if I’m really honest, I know that my experience of this show was enhanced by the fact that it was the first time I’d ever been in a room with David O’Doherty, after several years of being obsessed with his entire career. In my subjective view it was a mind-blowingly wonderful masterpiece, while a more objective observer would – if they have any taste – call it a fantastic show, but not necessarily, you know, perfect 10.

It was so much fun. That’s my overriding memory of it. He played a big room – an Assembly Rooms theatre with a capacity of nearly 500, sold out the night I went, I checked and saw he sold out a bunch of other nights too despite doing a full month-long run, and good for him – but I turned up really early to get the front of the line and front-row seat, and I’m so glad I did. It was so exciting to be right up there.

This was a rare show in which I was totally unaware of the time. Usually for any kind of show, even if I’m enjoying it a lot, I do have it in my head how long it’s been since we started, and by the time they start wrapping up I’m ready for that. Not with DO’D. DO’D has done this thing for nearly twenty years where the second-last bit of his show will be that year’s “My Beefs” song, about all the things that piss him off that year, get something silly and fun with lots of energy in the room, and then he’ll do his more poignant closing routine. In this show, he built up to it briefly by saying sometimes things bother him, it took the whole room a moment to catch up and realize what he was introducing, and then there was a massive cheer all across the theatre as he shouted “My beefs 2024!” and started playing his keyboard, and that was the coolest fucking thing. I think I cheered out loud. I never cheer out loud. Not at a show. Maybe at a sporting event, but not at a comedy or music show. I clap politely and I see the people around me outwardly expressing their excitement, and I think “Oh that looks like fun, being a person who does that.” But in this moment, I got so caught up in the “Oh my God new Beefs song and I don’t have to wait until the MICF gala short videos come out to see it, I get it live, right here!”, that I think I might have shouted something like “Yes!” I’m not sure, any noise I made was drowned out by everyone else’s cheering.

It was fucking cool. I’ve joked before about DO’D being a rockstar to me, but he was in that moment, and it was so much fun, but also it made me realize we only had one more short song until the closing routine, and I honestly had it in my head that we were still in the first 15 or so minutes. But nope, and he didn’t underrun or anything, I was just enjoying it so much that an hour felt like half that time. I was nowhere near ready to be done when he finally did wrap it up, I could have stayed there forever.

The show itself was lovely. Classic DO’D, just him and his keyboard up there, standing to talk and sitting to play, this is the first time that I realized how much the variety helps him avoid any lulls in a show (just when talking starts getting old he switches to singing, and vice-versa). It was a sweet show about his parents, which he used to talk about bigger cultural stuff in how he was raised and how people view their own lives and affect each other, it had touching messages and it was so funny. A couple of the songs had better end up getting officially recorded at some point, because they were so funny. Brilliant show from start to finish.

- Jordan Brookes – Fontanelle

This was the first show I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I got there on Sunday evening, saw this show on Sunday night, and then went back to the Air B&B to sleep before I started my full days in Edinburgh. At the Air B&B that night, I wrote a post that said I was genuinely a bit worried I’d made a mistake in putting Jordan Brookes first on my schedule, because that was so fucking fantastic that it’ll set the bar too high for everything else. Jordan Brookes was waiting outside as we emptied the room, to hand out flyers and stuff, and as we walked by, the audience member in front of me told him, “I’ve been coming to the Fringe for twenty years and that was the best show I’ve seen here.” I thought… yeah, I’ve been coming to the Fringe for about 90 minutes, but I feel like I could come for 20 more years and wouldn’t outdo that.

They gave him the award too early, I’ll say that much. It’s a shame that this show wasn’t eligible for the Perrier Award, because he already won it, for a show that’s on NextUp and is very good, but isn’t as good as this one. He has a few shows on NextUp, I like them all quite a bit – that’s why I bought a ticket to see him live – but this was his best one.

There was so much going on in it. Costumes and props and music and lighting cues. Background dancers (including one of the guys from Crizards, whom I was pleased with myself for recognizing because I'm quite bad with faces). The premise was that he’d written a musical about The Titanic, and every time there was even the smallest risk of a lull, he’d launch right into something high-energy about a musical, before going back to intellectual ruminations on societal conceptions of masculinity. It went dark in places, but that never felt like it was for shock value, it was just seamless. It was this whole big production, but at the same time it felt intimate and personal. This had the feeling to it of a masterpiece, a magnum opus.

Fun comedian-spotting side note – Jin Hao Li was in the audience when I saw it, conveniently seated across from me in the seating that went along both sides, so I could very easily glance at his face any time. Which I probably did too often, because I was interested in how an actual comedian was receiving this, and I suppose because I was interested in the validation of knowing whether my favourite comedians share my taste in comedy. I’m pleased to say that every time I looked over, Jin Hao Li was dying laughing, probably enjoying it even more than the rest of the audience, which was a lot.

- Sarah Keyworth – My Eyes Are Up Here

I’d heard a few earlier versions of this show, but the most recent was when they filmed it for Access Festival in January, so it had a lot of time to grow between then and August. It’s been on some international tours, won the Champion of Melbourne Award, developed over eight months. And that showed. I thought it was a very funny show even in its earlier forms, but by August the routines had been polished, the narrative was more coherent, the jokes sharper and even more had been added, and it was a beautiful piece of work.

It is so funny. The joke rate is really high, they’re all good. There’s a big variety of types of jokes, from quick little gags to drawn out, well set up ones. I think that really sets this show apart from similar ones. I hate it when people say things like “Oh, comedy doesn’t have to be funny anymore, you can just be emotionally moving and people like that now.” Because lots of emotionally moving shows are also funny, otherwise they wouldn’t be good comedy.

But I will admit, sometimes, the really emotional shows are probably, overall, less funny than ones that focus only on humour. Which is why I’m so impressed when I see one like this Keyworth show, that had a really moving emotional arc and covered their personal experiences with significant political issues (ADHD and top surgery/non-binary identity, primarily, which I feel weird calling “political issues” because it’s someone’s life, but those are big contentious things right now where voices of lived experience matter), that spoke touchingly about the importance of family and inter-generational connection and had an appropriately emotional conclusion, and when I look back on what that show did to me, I remember it making me properly laugh almost constantly.

Okay, I have one tiny issue. There was one joke in earlier versions of the show (they did this joke when they streamed the show for Access Festival, so I assume it’s okay to refer to it, as they chose to film that joke, it’s not just some WIP that they later scrapped), where the target was Ricky Gervais. In the Edinburgh version, they kept the joke but made it about transphobic Netflix comedians in general, and cut the references to The Office. I would love to know why they did that, because I thought the joke worked much better the first way. But that’s the only thing that I thought changed for the worse. Every other part of the show got even better.

This show deserves all its accolades, Sarah Keyworth deserves all the accolades, it felt like a privilege to sit in a darkened basement and get to see it live. Also, fun comedian spotting: Jordan Brookes was in the audience with me. I didn’t realize he was there until after the show when I saw him in the crowd emptying the room, but I heard him talking to some people about how good it was.

9.5

- Amy Gledhill – Make Me Look Fit on the Poster

I watched the NextUp stream of this show on the day that Amy Gledhill won the Perrier Award for it (or you know, whatever, Champion of Edinburgh), and I could immediately see why. Actually that might not be quite true – I made the mistake of going in thinking “Wow, show me what made this one better than the other, like, thousand eligible comedy shows in Edinburgh this year”, and that’s not the right way to go into a show. The opening routine was funny but not instantly groundbreaking, which led me to wonder why this isn’t the best fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And then I caught myself thinking that, told myself to knock it off and stop buying into fake award hype and just enjoy a comedy show on its own merits. And then it got really, really good. It got better and better as it went along, I got really drawn into the building narrative, it all came together in a strong and emotional ending, and by the time it was over, I found myself saying, “Wow, I see why that won the award.”

I hadn’t seen her perform solo before this, but I’ve seen and really enjoyed all the Delightful Sausage shows on NextUp (okay, if I’m honest, I’d really enjoyed two of them and the third not so much, but I’d enjoyed those other two a lot), and I think those skills really came through in this. It was just an hour of straight stand-up, but it felt more theatrical that most straight stand-up hours. Her facial expressions, her act-outs, and just her stage presence. Her ability to keep a crowd’s attention, to be playful and interesting no matter what she’s talking about. Those felt like the things she does in sketch to make the narrative more compelling, and it was interesting to see it applied to stand-up.

- Dan Rath – Pariah Carey

Holy God, is he ever funny. Some of the material was recycled from last year’s show, I’m Not Doing Well Folks (which is free on YouTube and excellent), but I didn’t even mind because so much of what’s funniest about Dan Rath his stage presence and delivery. He does a lot of one-liner-type jokes, stuff that should get less funny when you know the punchline, but in his case I could watch him say this stuff over and over and it’ll still be funny because of how he says it. And the majority of the show was new, and also funny. Dark, fucked up humour, but the kind of dark humour where he’s the target of every joke (so, not that thing where edgy comedians just say racial slurs and then say “sorry you don’t understand my dark sense of humour”).

At one point he asked me my job, and I said autism therapist (which is true), and he’d just done a bunch of jokes about how very autistic he is, and he did a whole riff about how I’ve come to get him, and then he tried to have a further interaction with me but I was too awkward for it, and he asked “Do you have what your clients have?”, and I said “Yes” before realizing he meant that rhetorically, which sort of made his point.

- Kiri Pritchard-McLean – Peacock

Probably the closest any Edinburgh 2024 comedy show came to making me cry. It came so close. It might have… I might have had, like, one actual tear in my eye, near the end. Blinking it away so people wouldn’t see me cry in a big theatre. And it was a big theatre. Kiri Pritchard-McLean is too famous for this festival, she did three nights in the Pleasance Grand with her name in massive lights behind her and a blindingly sparkly dress, it felt glamorous and exciting.

The show’s topic was one close to my heart, about how to be an adult who raises kids and teenagers while not being their biological parent. It’s not exactly my experience, as I’ve never been a foster parent, and that’s what the show was about. But so many of the themes and messages resonated with me so much, from all my years coaching, about how to be a mentor a safe place for youth who need it and might not get it from their biological parents. How to find fulfillment in a rewarding experience like that even if you don’t want to do the biological parenthood thing. And I don’t want to do the biological parenthood thing, but a couple of weeks ago I went to the wedding of a guy whom I started coaching when he was fourteen years old, and now he’s 27 and on his wedding day he hugged me and told me he’d not have got here without my support and that I was his rock in his teenage/early twenties years, and I told him I wouldn’t be able to be any prouder of him even if he were my actual son, and it was fine that that made us both tear up because it’s a wedding, a normal place to cry, rather than a theatre where a woman in a sparkly dress is talking about the code name she used with her foster kids.

…This one hit me too personally for me to be able to talk very well about the show itself, rather than veering off into my own stuff that it brought up, but it was such a well put together show. The type of comedy hour that just constantly signals experience and professionalism from the person who wrote and delivered it. Polished, coherent, confidence. Took what could have been a really boring topic, the admin involved in navigating the social care system, and made it consistently funny. And took what was always going to be an emotionally affective topic, the reasons to work in the social care system, and hit all the right emotional notes without once feeling over-wrought.

I’m so glad that my 5 days (plus one evening) in Edinburgh overlapped with Kiri’s three, this one was worth taking the opportunity to see live.

- Marjolein Robertson – O

This was a rare chance I took on someone I knew very little about before this. I’d heard a few short sets that she’d done on mixed bills, and I’d liked them well enough, but little 10-minute things aren’t really the way to appreciate a comedian like this one. I’d read a lot about how great her 2023 stand-up hour was, so I figured I’d buy a ticket for her 2024 one and hope it’s true that she’s very good.

It was true. Whatever my expectations were, she exceeded them. I didn’t know the topic going in, so I was immediately surprised by (I assume this isn’t a major spoiler, I’m pretty sure the synopsis is easy to find) realizing she was going to spend the whole hour talking about menstrual complications (that seems like too small a term to describe some of the quite severe health issues she discussed, but she also discussed the issue more broadly). I initially thought, “Wow, you don’t hear much about that in comedy.” And then I thought, “Hang on, it was a stereotype for years that female comedians only talk about periods.” Marjolein even addressed that stereotype in her show, in a moment that got one of the biggest laughs out of me that I got from the whole festival.

But 1) Obviously that’s bullshit, some female comedians made a few jokes about periods and then they got defined entirely as that by misogynists who think even two minutes on the subject is too much, and 2) Yeah I’ve heard a few period jokes before, but not like this. I’ve never heard any comedian address it like this. This took on an incredibly weighty subject (not that menstruation has to be an inherently weighty subject, but it is when discussing a possibly life-threatening medical condition associated with it), and handled in a way that gave it its due seriousness while still being funny at regular intervals. I say “at regular intervals” because yeah, this show had times when it would go a few minutes without being funny. It had to, for the whole thing to work. But those few minutes would always hold your attention in some other way; they’d be interesting (giving me information I didn’t already know about medical situations, or Scottish legends), or scary, or sad, or occasionally heartwarming. And she used that brilliantly to highlight the funny parts. Playing with tension, turning it all the way up for the serious bits, and then getting an even bigger laugh for her next joke because she had so much tension to release.

I was captivated from start to finish in this show. Any time there was any risk of a lull, she’d launch into some mythology, and then bring it back around. I guess the mythology bits could maybe have been integrated slightly better into the main themes of the show – I could see where it was going by the end, but not always in the middle. I don’t know, that’s a tiny nitpicky thing because I felt like I had to find a flaw in it. It’s a very good hour of comedy.

- Natalie Palamides – WEER

Fucking brilliant, obviously. Should probably be rated even higher than this, really. It’s probably the most impressive display of talent that I’ve seen in the entire festival, one of the most impressive displays of talent that I’ve ever seen on a stage. It’s theatre, rather than just comedy (I don’t know where the line is between a play and a narrative comedy show, but this was definitely a play), but it was still frequently funny.

I wasn’t planning to see it until the last moment, because I enjoyed the two shows that Natalie Palamides has filmed before – Laid and Nate – but they also made me feel weird and uncomfortable with the nudity (entirely my issue, not anything she did wrong – I just do not have Theatre Experience to be chill about a naked person on stage), and creeped out by the puppets, and I was sort of glad that I watched those alone where I could curl up in a ball of discomfort, rather than in a theatre full of people. But a friend of mine gave this show a very high recommendation to me, and I figured this is the type of thing that’s better for a live experience, so I may as well take the chance to see her. I bought a ticket a few days before I arrived in Edinburgh.

Natalie Palamides plays both the man and woman in a romcom, half her body dressed/made up as one and half as the other, constantly switching which half of her is facing the audience so she can play one and then the other as they interact with each other, and that sounds like the worst thing in the world if done badly but blindingly impressive if done well, and this was the latter. Very much the latter. I was occasionally distracted from other aspects of the play, by just marveling at how impressive the situation was. I don’t really have enough Theatre Experience to have a proper informed opinion about this play, beyond “fucking hell, that was impressive”. She did get naked at one point but at least I was expecting it this time and I did not curl up in a ball. I’m so glad I saw it live.

9.25

- Ed Night – The Plunge

This show was not in a glamourous theatre. It was in a cramped, small, dark basement that smelled bad. And I don’t know how to make it sound like the high compliment it’s meant to be, when I say that is the perfect venue for Ed Night. It’s almost a shame that he’s so talented he’ll probably get too successful to play a room like that soon. But it’s only almost a shame. It’s not quite a shame, it’s actually a very good thing. Because I have now spent several years rooting for this guy to get famous.

I wrote this story out a few times during the posts that I hastily made from the festival itself, but I’ll write it again for this one. I first discovered Ed Night a few years ago, when I made the very ill-advised decision to watch every episode of Roast Battle UK, one of the worst guilty pleasure shows I’ve ever seen. “Guilty pleasure” probably isn’t an accurate term, because I didn’t even enjoy most of it. But there were a few that I found funny. And my favourite of the whole show was one with Huge Davies, a comedian I knew a bit, and Ed Night, a comedian I did not know at all. I looked up Ed Night afterward, and was disappointed to find he’s done nearly nothing else on TV or radio or recorded stand-up. I found a couple of really short sets he did on YouTube, liked those a lot, but there was no more.

For the next while, I kept trying to follow his stuff, and being annoyed that he wasn’t famous enough for me to see him from Canada. I could go see him in a club if I lived in the UK, but there’s an ocean. He started a podcast with Huge Davies and Sunil Patel, and I tried the first episode, but could not get through it. Maybe it gets good, I don’t know. I couldn’t get into it. And I hear it now involves making Ed Gamble read pornography on a podcast, as though someone else didn't do that 15 years ago, and do it so well that that idea's been burned. No one else could come close to matching that glory and shouldn't even try.

Anyway, Ed Night has that, and has a YouTube series about bad movies, but that is a topic that I care so little about. I just wanted to see his stand-up, to test my hypothesis, based on like 8 minutes of Roast Battle, that I bet I’d really like this guy, if I could see his actual work. That was the hypothesis, that I probably put way too much faith in, based on so little evidence. That he was both objectively good at comedy, and that his comedy would probably be the sort of thing that I subjectively like. I spent a couple of years rooting for his career to succeed as thought it were a sports team, hoping he'd get famous enough to record a special or something, but he didn't, so I had to go to him instead.

So when I got the chance to plan a trip to Edinburgh, one of the first tickets I booked was Ed Night, dedicating a whole primetime timeslot this guy I knew basically fuck all about. I nearly walked into him on the street outside the Pleasance Courtyard, a couple of days before I saw his show, and I had a moment of thinking… "Fuck, I had to cut so many comedians from my list of people to see, what if this guy is a waste of one of my precious few 7-8 PM timeslots? Can I really be sure he'll be worth it, just because I like that he referenced Pokemon in a Roast Battle?"

So after I actually saw his show, I was so fucking pleased to report that it turns out Ed Night is good at stand-up comedy. He could have been shit. Some people are shit. But he was so good. So good that I bet he’ll get famous soon, and then there will be more stuff by him that gets released in ways that I can see it from across the ocean, and that’ll be convenient. But I’m glad that before that happens, I got to see him in a small cramped darkened basement, where his style of comedy clearly belongs.

It was funny, and, as I’d suspected, the specific type of thing that I like in stand-up. Very dark, but not in a racial slur way. On the contrary, sprinkled with angry left-wing sentiments (I wouldn’t call it political comedy, but it was sharply opinionated and on the left side of whatever political issues did come up). Reminded me of Dan Rath, in some ways, with its level of darkness of his stand-up persona being extreme low status, but with Dan Rath it was more obviously a character, while with Ed Night… I mean obviously it was curated, but it felt more real.

It was about mental illness and physical illness and anxiety about the future and dangerous dogs and death and caregiving and the healthcare system and he found some time to talk shit about Tom Binns, a fairly left-field target but one that’s definitely worth shit talking. He got a Pokemon reference into a suicide joke, which is right up my alley. It was also surprisingly gag-heavy, they were constant and sprinkled around all the pessimistic rhetoric and you can tell he’s spent a long time crafting this show to get as much as possible out of every minute.

I think my description of this show has been longer than my description for any of the others so far, and I really have to start cutting these down soon because there are 65 shows on the list and if I continue at this rate, this post will technically qualify as a novella. But I needed a long time to explain this one, because I need one thing to be very, very clear: my decision to watch Roast Battle has now been artistically justified. It’s not an awful guilty pleasure, it’s the way I discovered a guy who turned out to be very good at stand-up comedy, so it was actually a good decision for my overall experience of art.

- Emma Sidi – Is Sue Grey

This is another one where I took a bit of a chance on someone I didn’t know well. I knew she was supposed to be good, she did amusing characters on YouTube, she did good acting on Starstruck, she hung out with Rose Matafeo so she had to be all right, comedians I like rate her. I was trying to expand my comedy horizons a bit, figured it would be a safe bet to go with her as a way to experience character comedy. Plus it was advertised as something political, and while I can’t stand it when people say “PoLiTiCaL cOmEdY iS dEaD nOw” as though Andy Zaltzman and his entire Bugle empire just doesn’t exist, it is true that political comedy’s not as common as I’d like. So I booked a ticket (booked it just before the Taskmaster season 18 lineup spoilers came out, which I’d like noted for the record so I get credit for jumping on the bandwagon before it was cool, if only just).

It was so much fun. From start to finish, it was huge fun to be in that room. I must admit that about five minutes in, I was thinking… “Okay, this is funny so far, but surely she can’t keep it up. Is it really going to be an entire hour of just this one character? She can’t have a whole hour worth of material on this.” But she did. It never felt, to me, like a sketch stretched thin across an hour (though I’ve seen some reviews that say it was, so I guess your mileage may vary, if your mileage is incorrect). It felt like she had more ideas than she knew what to do with. She took us through the history of Sue Grey’s career chronologically, which I liked. It gave the narrative a coherent arch. She threw in all these different things, water cooler audience participation and weirdly hilarious Spanish bits and this surreal thread with a dwarf, that kept it feeling fresh to me, like it wasn’t just the same stuff repeated.

And the ending really got to me. I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a good ending; I’ve probably come away from some stand-up shows thinking they were better than they really were, because the ending was better than the show and that’s what forms the lasting impression, and I will fall for that trick if it’s executed well enough. I don’t think that’s what happened here. It’s now been a couple of months since I saw the show, I have enough distance so if I was just taken in by a manipulatively strong ending, I’d have noticed by now, as I look back on the whole show. It was all good. But that ending did work on me.

I guess I’m not supposed to write the details of what she did at the end due to spoilers for a touring show (I’m not avoiding spoilers altogether here, but I try not to go too heavy on them), but I have to say, she brought it all together, she suddenly and really sharply brought home the way that these fun sketches represent real things and it’s affecting real British people’s lives, and it wasn’t long after the election when I saw this, and I’m not even British but I’ve been invested in their politics for long enough to feel the emotional weight of that too (and I can relate, Canada’s had its own struggles with long-term Tory rule, and alternatives-to-Tory that are weak centrist bullshit), and I thought that was a pretty powerful statement to make on this particular summer. Which is why I don’t understand all the reviews for this show that say it was a fluffy character piece but missed the opportunity to make any actual satirical points. Maybe Steve Bennett and I saw different shows.

- Laura Davis – Albatross

Okay, for real this time, I need to start making these commentary sections shorter. Laura Davis writes brilliant poetic comedy, and I need to apologize to them for using that term because they complain in the show about people who call their stand-up poetry, but they also complain about pretty much every way this show could possibly be described, they’re not leaving us much. I’m pretty sure it is, in fact, a show about loneliness. And it’s poetic as fuck. It’s atmospheric. It’s so atmospheric.

I think it might fall just barely short of being my favourite Laura Davis show, just a notch behind If This Is It, but God, that is a high bar. I think it probably surpasses their other stuff, and their other stuff is really good too, but Albatross feels a bit like the show they’ve been trying to write for years. The atmosphere. The brilliant, engaging atmosphere they create, with stories of walking alone at night and staring at the abyss in the ocean. It probably helps that I, personally, romanticize the ocean a lot. I’ve spent many of my favourite hours of my life staring into the abyss of the ocean, and Laura Davis perfectly captured how it feels to look out and feel like you could be swallowed up by it. By the ocean, and by the information in the world, and all these other themes that came together brilliantly.

The stories about their childhood were poignantly relatable. The stories about feeling an instinctive dislike for people who can have fun in public but then feeling guilt about that dislike and trying to understand it – that was poignantly relatable too. And the stuff about dead birds on the beach. Atmospheric as fuck. I want to live in the world that Laura Davis sculpted for me.

I try to avoid the temptation to just reflexively compare everything good in comedy to Daniel Kitson. Laura Davis is the person with whom I have the second most difficulty in avoiding the comparison. The person with whom I find that comparison most difficult to avoid is Alice Fraser, who unfortunately was not in Edinburgh this year. But the end of this Laura Davis show had me really thinking of some of the old Kitson shows that end on a bit crescendo, like Impotent Fury of the Privileged or even It’s the Fireworks Talking. I’m just big on shows that metaphorically take you to the ocean and throw it all at you.

And it was also funny. Okay? Things can be poignantly relatable and atmospheric and also funny. It made me laugh. Laura Davis is really good at this.

- Sheeps – The Giggle Bunch (That's Our Name For You)

This was another “take the chance to see it live while it’s there, and broaden your horizons beyond straight stand-up” gamble that paid off hugely. I had heard some Sheeps stuff before and found it funny, and I like Liam Williams a lot from his other work (Ladhood TV/radio, Pls Like, that one stand-up special he did for the BBC), but to be honest I didn’t know Sheeps well enough to expect this one to be a standout. Luckily, my expectations were significantly exceeded.

Every sketch was funny, which was a good start. I always think of that Mitchell & Webb sketch when I see sketch shows, and it’s pretty accurate, they’re almost never all hits, even the good ones. But I think this Sheeps show was. Obviously some sketches were better than others, but all of them made me laugh at some point, none felt like they were just filler.

There was a fairly ambitious one near the end where they were doing some sort of anti-humour thing about AI, which got deliberately unfunny at times and then got funnier again as they ran the joke further and further into the ground, and to be honest, I’m still not sure what I think of that one. It was either a genius bit of writing and the best bit of the show, or their only miss. Probably the first thing, I think. It’s hard to tell.

But aside from that one sketch, every other one was straightforwardly good, accessible, funny. There was a bit of political stuff. There was an emotional arc that had the twist being, as far as they presented it to the audience, true (I mean, I assume stylized for stage and stuff, the same way that truth gets stylized in straight stand-up, but it was apparently an accurate representation of their professional relationship, which isn’t something I’d normally expect to see in a sketch show). Whether or not the “true” bits were objectively real, that heightened the impact, I think. The result was a collection of (mostly) unrelated funny sketches, and an emotional throughline with a big conclusion at the end. The way all those things came together was amazing, I felt like I was watching something really polished and great. Overall, it was just great.

- BriTANick – Dummy

It was so fun! It was like high school! In the best way! Not in the way that the comedy quality was as though a high school student made it. In the way that it immediately brought me back to when I was in high school, trading memes and College Humour videos with my friends. Not that this was meme-quality humour either! It wasn’t, it’s the College Humour that it reminded me of. Cracked. That stuff. Their opening song was so much in that vein, it immediately put me in the frame of mind to enjoy that sort of thing and remember how funny that very silly style of comedy can be, and then they kept it up for an hour (well, 45 minutes).

It was another sketch show with an overarching narrative, though this one was entirely fictional, and absurd, to the point where it didn’t really work, but intentionally so. Like, the plot not working was the joke. And it doesn’t sound like that joke should be funny, when I write it like that. But it really was.

The individual sketches were also funny, they way they’d start out as one thing and inevitably spiral into the confusing messing of the overarching plot. This might be really specific to my high school experience of being into the types of comedy these guys did, but hearing this type of thing again made me feel like a teenager, and laugh like a teenager, and it was so well written and just enormous fun.

- Guy Williams – This Glass House Makes It Easy to See All the Cowards I'm Throwing Stones At

I have already established – long established, repeatedly – that as much as I’d like to be someone who says “I’m not into that shouty comedy, I just don’t think you need to be so brash to be funny”, my list of favourite comedians shows the opposite is true. I fucking love having my own political views shouted at me aggressively from someone who will cathartically give me a break from the relentless efforts I make to try to “be fair” to the other side. See the one person on this list whose show I rated a 10. See Tom Ballard, a couple of spots down from this part (same rating, just lower alphabetically, I sorted the spreadsheet by rating and then by comedian first name, I know how to make consuming art fun). And see Guy Williams. So they can be British, Aussie, Kiwi, doesn’t matter. As long as they will shout my own political opinions at me in a cathartic way. (They do not have to be men, either, but unfortunately Josie Long did not arrive at this festival until after I’d left.)

I think the most impressive thing Guy Williams achieves with this show is managing to be genuinely edgy from a left-wing perspective. There are so many comedians out there claiming to be edgy. Most of them are right-wing edgelords, saying “Sorry you don’t have a dark enough sense of humour to appreciate my racial slurs.” Some of them are left-wing people saying “Fuck the queen of England – oh, sorry if that’s too offensive for you,” while speaking to an audience of people who clearly are not fans of colonialism. Guy Williams is a very rare person expressing views that made me say – “Okay, if you start saying ‘Sorry this material might be too edgy for some people’, that would be fair enough, he’s earned that.”

There were some genuinely interesting ideas in this show, like some stuff about reversing the mathematical formula for comedy + time = tragedy – a bit that I wished had gone on longer because I thought he was on to something cool with that. There was also a bit about Cat Stevens’ music that probably went on for slightly too long, but he delivered it with so much enthusiasm that I stayed on board anyway. There was probably the best Ricky Gervais joke I’ve ever heard (as in jokes about Ricky Gervais… not by him), in a festival where I heard quite a few Ricky Gervais jokes (even though Keyworth cut theirs, there were lots of people referencing him).

This show didn’t feel nearly as polished as most of the great shows at this festival. I have tried to work this out, but I cannot tell how much of that was a master of the craft intentionally making his work look effortless, and how much was genuinely shambolic. Doesn’t really matter though, since it was all so funny.

- Mark Watson – Work-In-Progress Is Not a Cop-Out, It Demonstrates Respect For The Paying Audience

This was billed as work in progress, as per the title, and it was certainly more like an actual WIP than the other half of Wumar, who turned up with a show he’d been perfecting all year and stuck a WIP label on it. But this was certainly not an early WIP, as most of the material in it was stuff I heard Mark Watson do at Access Festival in January (though it’s improved since then). So it was material that he’s been working on for a while, but performed in a room with literally 37 seats (I counted them), and for not very much money, due to its WIP status. It was the first time I’d seen Mark Watson live, after being a huge fan of lots of his work for a long time (don’t think about the cheating on his wife thing don’t think about the cheating on his wife thing, we’re just trying to have nice things here), and it was pretty cool to see him in a room that small.

It was really funny. I’ve got to admit I’d kind of forgotten, by the time I saw that show, how very funny Mark Watson can be. I like Mark Watson a lot as one of the more intellectual comedians; he’s so good as an interviewee on podcasts and things, because he’s so thoughtful, speaks so insightfully about aspects of the human experience that I find really resonate. I find him inspiring, the way he talks candidly about even the less savoury sides of anxiety, like bitterness and envy and frustration, the way he talks about alcohol and mental health stuff that makes me feel less shitty about my experiences with that, if someone as smart and talented as him can describe those same experiences with it (don’t think about the cheating on his wife thing just let us have nice things). But in the midst of this, it had been a little while since I’d watched his actual stand-up, and I think I forgot how purely funny he can be.

I was very much reminded of that in this room of 37 people, around the corner from the actual Stand, upstairs in a weird room where you could hear all the traffic outside. I laughed so hard, almost constantly for a whole hour. I’d heard a bunch of it before from Access Festival, but there was new stuff, and the older stuff got polished, and there was more of an arc to it. I could see, during Access Festival, where this might be going – bringing overall themes about the disconnection in technology and AI. By Edinburgh that was even clearer, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it’ll end up once it’s all integrated.

For ages, he has been mentioning on podcasts and things that he’s scared of thunderstorms and thinks that should be considered a normal and reasonable fear, that it’s weird that people are considered an anomaly if they’re scared of explosions and fire in the sky. Which I have been saying for years, but obviously I haven’t been saying it in a way that’s as articulate or funny as the way Mark Watson says it. I even once cut out a clip of Mark Watson discussing this on a podcast and sent it to my mother, to back up my side of the argument that we’ve been having since I was a teenager, where she says “But thunderstorms are fun!” and I say “No they’re terrifying and it’s weird that not everyone thinks so.”

I’d heard Mark Watson say this on podcasts before, hadn’t heard him say it in stand-up, until this stand-up show. Where he asked the audience if anyone’s scared of thunderstorms, and I said “Yes” – I swear I wasn’t trying to draw his attention to me, but I assumed lots of people would say “Yes”, and my voice would be lost in the crowd. Instead, I was the only one who answered, because I’d kind of forgotten that there were only 37 people in the room. So Mark Watson pointed at me, said “Thank you” for being one of those few people to agree with him about thunderstorms, and proceeded to do a whole routine on thunderstorms, in which he kept pointing to me and saying “Me and this woman are the ones in the right, by being scared of them.”

And that was... look, I know we’re not supposed to parasocially put our favourite comedians on pedestals or else we’ll get all disappointed when we inevitably find out that they cheat on their wives and stuff. But that was fucking cool. Mark Watson looked at me and it was fucking cool. Okay? Let me have nice things.

- Tom Ballard – Good Point Well Made

I’d never noticed, before seeing this show live, that Tom Ballard is too big for a room. Too tall, shoulders too broad, he could barely fit onto that stage in the cramped basement. His delivery style didn’t help, waving his arms around, reaching up in the air, leaving forward to yell at people. I even saw him live in Montreal last year, but for some reason, he didn’t seem quite so larger than life at that time. I really noticed it this year, though. He was everywhere. Loud and relentless and in your face and all over the stage.

I have a friend who very much dislikes Tom Ballard’s comedy, and I’d wondered why someone would reaction with such a strong dislike to Tom Ballard, even if you’re not really into the material. But after seeing him live in that cramped basement, I get it. If you like that stuff, it’s great. If you don’t, it would be overwhelming dose of stuff you don’t like, and would be incredibly annoying.

Luckily, I love that stuff. Tom Ballard cathartically shouted my own opinions at me at top volume for an entire hour, but shouted them in a more articulate and funny way that I could manage. Took my opinions that I find exhausting day to day, to walk around carrying the weight of these frustrating fucking opinions that put me at odds with everyone I know, and Tom made them into something that could make me laugh, that made me feel connected rather than alienated.

He was furious, talking about a specific political situation in Australia, but putting it in a way that will be relatable to anyone who’s seen a vote by their fellow citizens make them realize what kinds of people they share their spaces with (not that it needs that broader relatability, really, as that one Australian situation is bad enough to deserve its own focus). But his underlying thesis was a broader one, about wanting the left to stop trying to moderate its opinions in the name of reaching across the aisle, about how fucking cathartic it is to say “Actually I’m right and your opinion does make you a bad person because it’s racist and racists are bad.” I don’t even realize how tiring it is to try to “be fair” and not say that stuff all the time, until I let a comedian take that burden off me for a bit.

This show recycled a little bit of material from his 2022 show, about how right-wing people aren’t listening to us and aren’t making art because they’re too busy running the world, so left-wing people should probably stop considering whether we listen to enough right-wing people when making our art. I did not mind that material getting recycled at all, because 1) it’s stuff I liked a lot and was happy to hear again, every time I lament the fact that I don’t live in this mythical “liberal bubble” that sounds like a great place to live, I think of Tom Ballard shouting about how the liberal bubble is actually great, and 2) it fit really well into the thesis of his 2024 show, he’s developed the idea a lot further than he had a couple of years ago, and I liked seeing that get developed.

The whole show was a great time. I even managed to stop and the end and briefly speak to him, something I almost never do because the thought of speaking to famous comedians terrifies me, but he was waiting outside the venue after the show with a bucket, and I was able to hang back so I’d be at the end of the line and wouldn’t hold up other people, I gave him some extra money even though of course I’d paid for a ticket, and I told him how I saw him live in Canada last year and loved it but I think this was even better, and it was a great time and he’s so cool and very nice to meet him! And he was so nice. It was actually weird, after the hour of high-energy aggressive shouting, how different he was out-of-persona outside, came across as really humble and asked me what my name was and thanked me for coming. It was cool. I was glad I did it.

8.75

- Catherine Bohart – Again, With Feelings

Well, at some point I’d started to succeed in keeping these commentary passages short, and then they got long again. There are 65 of these fucking shows, this isn’t sustainable. However, the ones I rated between 9 and 10 were the ones I felt the most strongly about, so those will mostly be the ones I have the most to say about. They need to get shorter after this. Like. Significantly shorter. I have a life to lead.

This hour was very funny. Catherine Bohart discussed topics that are not at all relatable to me, about long-term relationships and considering parenthood (even her stuff about being gay was not all that relatable to me, as most of it was based around being one of those gay people who actually has relationships on a regular basis), but that made it more impressive to me, because it made me laugh so much, and if someone can make me laugh with material I do not personally relate to,

- Chris Cantrill – Easily Swayed

I’m going to copy some stuff from a Tumblr post that I wrote right after watching this show, to save me a bit of time:

I didn’t know what to expect when I went into this show, given the offbeat Delightful Sausage, but this was straight stand-up. Stories about his life, told as himself, but he did wear a cape for much of the show, which made sense in context. It hit some themes that chimed quite well with me at the moment – depression and the loneliness of old friendships deteriorating as you get older. So it got a little dark at times, but it never felt very dark, and it ended on a note so hopeful that I may have been briefly, genuinely moved.

This was one of those stand-up hours where you can feel how competent and experienced the person who put it together is. It was paced really well, everything felt like it was in the right order and it really built up and came together nicely. I love how easily he could move between whimsey (there was some stuff about Medieval fantasy lands in there), straightforward storytelling, and occasional breaks to add something like a political opinion or a fact about history. All the different types of material flowed so well that none of the seams felt jarring. It felt honest about depression without seeming overwrought or overly emotional, which is pretty impressive.

He dropped little threads early on that I’d assumed were nothing but came back unexpectedly, and I always like that. He had so many little ways of describing things that I’ve found myself going back to in my mind, I feel like this is going to be one of those things where a year from now I wonder why I use a certain turn of phrase when I talk about certain things, and then remember I heard it in a Chris Cantrill show.

And I love how much care he took over all the people in his story, who were mainly his friends. That seemed like his skills as a sketch comedian coming out, he could make all these people come to life in the stories; I ended up sympathizing with everyone and getting really invested in all the different things that were going on. He’s spent all this time in Delightful Sausage making fictional characters seem real, and he continued that in such a lovely way when telling us about people he knew.

This show had, you know – heart, or whatever would be a less cheesy word to describe that.

- Milo Edwards – How Revolting! Sorry To Offend

More political comedy, in an era when supposedly political comedy is dead. I don’t know if this show is quite as good as Voicemail, my favourite Milo Edwards show, but that’s a fucking high bar. This one is certainly a close second for my favourite Milo Edwards show, it’s sharp and clear and goes into uncomfortable territory but deals with it deftly – all the stuff Milo Edwards does best. This is a weird comparison and I don’t know if it makes sense, but I sort of think of Milo Edwards as the edgy intelligent analytical comedian that Alfie Brown wanted to be, and maybe would have been if he weren’t such a dick.

This latest Milo Edwards show is almost entirely about class, a topic that frequently gets referenced in British comedy, occasionally gets lampooned for a few minutes, rarely gets truly examined. It has more explicitly political material than some of his previous stuff, the joke rate is very high, and they’re consistently good. Great show.

8.5

- Eleanor Morton – Haunted House

This show started a little bit slowly, I was slightly disappointed for the first five minutes or so. Because the room promised a lot – there was a funny and atmospheric ghostly recording playing as we walked in, there were candles and an intricate dollhouse on stage, Eleanor came out dressed dramatically in white. And then she started some somewhat conventional material, when according to the setup, she should have started floating through walls and stuff.

However, it started getting better very quickly, and snowballed that way until I was utterly captivated by about 20 minutes in, until the end. She had some really interesting stuff about being from Edinburgh and having her colleagues all descend upon her hometown for one month of every year, during the festival. I found that a really interesting perspective, and one I had been wondering about, how someone from Edinburgh feels about the festival every year (according Eleanor Morton: frustrated that her complex city gets reduced to touristy stuff like Harry Potter and ghost tours; according to an Uber driver I asked: nice to get the extra work; according to the woman who ran my Air B&B: incredibly annoying as there’s nowhere to park and too many people around to run errands in town).

She slowly brought in this other thread, about the sexual predators who are all over comedy, and I thought she came up with some really interesting ways to weave that around her theme of ghosts and haunted buildings. She said something that Guy Williams had also specifically mentioned, which is that everyone at this festival says we have to do something about predators in comedy, but everyone is also aware that there were comedians performing at that festival that month, and no one had done anything about it. She told a few specific stories but named no specific names.

It all came together really nicely by the end, the stuff about Edinburgh and about ghosts and about dangerous people, and I found the very end pretty emotional, as she talked about wanting to protect her city and her friends and her colleagues in her own home. I don’t know how well this show would travel outside Edinburgh, but performed in a darkened basement during the Edinburgh festival with the candles and the dollhouse and sort of surreal, outside-the-real world feeling of the entire festival (a feeling she addressed repeatedly), it was a very good show.

- Jin Hao Li – Swimming in a Submarine

Okay, I’m going back to keeping this short again. So short. Super short. There was really ambitious structure here that hit all the cool notes that he couldn’t have gotten to any other way. It was ethereal, mesmerizing, in a way that just enhanced the jokes because the laughs were bigger when we were all too mesmerized to expect them. Like an edgier Johnny White Really-Really, which is a fascinating thing for a person to be. I could listen to Jin Hao Li talk for hours. I want him to be my nephew, I think.

- Lou Wall – The Bisexual’s Lament

Blinding, lightning-paced show that really needs to be seen in person to have any chance of taking it all in. Dealt with some very heavy topics without ever getting over-emotional, jumped around from idea to idea, was consistently funny enough to distract us from how fucked up the subject matter was, though every once in a while they’d bring that back into focus, quite effectively. There should be no way to do a routine about Facebook Marketplace that’s at all interesting anymore, but Lou Wall managed to find it, I can’t believe I’m staying this but holy hell their Facebook Marketplace material was funny. All their material was funny, except the stuff that was harrowing, and that was successfully harrowing. Fun comedian spotting: Rhys Nicholson sat behind me during this, so you know it’s a cool show.

8.25

- Jonny & the Baptists – The Happiness Index

I saw them in a circus tent-like room, with about 20 people sparsely scattered across benches. I’d never seen them before (I bought the ticket on the strength of: 1) political comedy is not dead and I wanted to see as many people as I could who were out there proving it, and 2) Josie Long likes him so he has to be all right), but then since then I have bought four of their albums off Bandcamp, so that tells you something about how much I enjoyed this hour. It felt like a proper “experience the Fringe” moment to sit in a circus tent sparsely populated by about 20 people, and watch Josie Long’s life partner and his friend’s little brother (I also listened to their ComCom episode after seeing them, apparently that’s how Jonny Donahoe and Paddy Gervers met) perform what was ostensibly a musical version of Shakespeare, but was in fact a detailed, chronological, musical critique of how 14 years of Tory rule had dismantled the NHS and arts funding in Britain.

…The above paragraph is unnecessarily dismissive, reducing the whole thing to a twee novelty, when actually it was a well-written and well-performed hour with funny songs, touching moments of friendship, and a genuinely important political message/call to arms that was delivered well.

- Melanie Bracewell – Attack of the Melanie Bracewell

I’m vaguely paranoid to write her name here because she is one of the very few celebrities who are actually on Tumblr, but I’ve probably buried this enough so that it’s all right. I was sure what I was expecting from this, knowing Melanie Bracewell only from Taskmaster (though since this I’ve gone and watched her YouTube special), but I enjoyed this a lot. It’s almost all one story, which I generally like in a comedy hour, if they have enough material to fill an hour of one thing. In this case, the story of trying to retrieve stolen air pods. Which I expected to just a storytelling device, a story where the message is that sometimes you don’t get closure, so I was surprised and quite entertained when this turned out to be a full narrative with an ending and everything.

I won’t spoil more than that, I guess, but it was fun all the way along. The story had twists and turns and I was genuinely invested, in addition to enjoying the jokes and everything else. There was an underlying message about standing up for yourself and things like that, but it was mostly just an interesting narrative with solid humour and engaging personality. Good stuff.

- Pierre Novellie – Must We?

When I made a spreadsheet like this for the 2023 Edinburgh Festival (which I didn’t even attend in person, but some shows got streamed or otherwise put in forms where I could hear them, and those still had to be tracked, there’s no point to consuming art without spreadsheets), I gave Pierre Novellie’s show Why Are You Laughing? a 9.5, and it is still one of my favourite stand-up shows I’ve ever heard. This one had some of the same type of stuff that was so good in the previous show, it just felt slightly unfinished comparison. Pierre Novellie even addresses that within the show, saying he’s been writing a book and touring his previous show and had so much else on that it was hard to write a whole new hour at the same time. Which is fair enough – his book is great, everyone should buy it, but it was pretty dense in places and must have taken a lot of time and effort and stretched him pretty thin.

There were a lot of funny individual bits, but they didn’t come together as well as they have in some of his previous shows (not just his 2023 one, but the 2022 one on which he based his book). He had an ending routine with some deeper stuff behind it, and I thought that had a lot more potential than he actually got from it, it felt slightly tacked on. On the other hand, it made me laugh repeatedly, and he also said at the beginning, quite correctly, that it’s odd that “It was just a funny hour of comedy” can be an insult (or at best, damning with faint praise). This was a really funny hour of comedy, which is why I’ve still ranked it above most other stuff I’ve saw, I’ve just unfairly spent most of this description explaining why he’s come down from a 9.5.

This was a funny hour of comedy. No need to mitigate that. He had some good jokes about food, and I normally dislike jokes about food, but his were so good that I liked them anyway.

- Shenoah Allen – Bloodlust Summertime

These are getting long again, I need to curb that. This was an hour of trauma. There were frequent jokes within the trauma stories, and they were funny. I found myself thinking he could have gone further in putting some overarching meaning or analysis into the trauma stories, but as Pierre Novellie would say, what’s wrong with just telling a bunch of good jokes? This had jokes and happened to also contain a lot of trauma, rather than being one of those “here’s a deep analysis of how my trauma’s affected me” shows. Which I think sort of surprised me, as I’ve been conditioned to expect trauma-filled comedy shows to go that way, and this didn’t. But it was funny, and fascinating, a complex look into a certain type of life. It was definitely not what I was expecting from a guy I know from an improv clown duo. It was not improv and it was not clowning. And to be honest, as much as I want to expand my horizons and appreciate experimental comedy more, I enjoyed this stand-up show way more than I’d enjoy improv and clowning. It’s very good.

- Stevie Martin – clout

A show about internet comedy vs. live comedy, the arbitrary nature of algorithms, the changing nature of the comedy industry as a whole with the rise of social media. A topic I find very interesting, and I know I’ve got some prejudice against the social media comedians, so Stevie Martin was a great person knock through some of that prejudice by putting a great show about how sometimes you do what you’ve got to do, social media-wise, but live comedy is hardly perfect either, and surely there’s room for both. This was incredibly well put together, with slides and videos and some props, I appreciated the way she used this to what a really dedicated comedian can do with technology. It consistently set up expectations and then subverted them.

- Susie McCabe – Merchant of Menace

Another show that’s mainly about class, this time told by a working class Glaswegian, who had observations on a lot of different areas of life that get divided by class, like schools and hotels and grocery stores and travel. Sharp observations, captivating delivery, especially impressive for a woman who had a heart attack about ten days before the festival. I’ve been a big fan of Susie McCabe ever since I first saw her on Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, I liked her 2023 stand-up special, thought this one was better. It ended on a poem, a really unassuming poem delivered in an even tone so the quality of the writing could speak for itself, and I love stuff like that. A really funny hour of comedy., and I don’t mean that as faint praise.

- Judi Love (MC), Ivo Graham, Sophie Duker, Jin Hao Li – ITVX Presents Live Comedy from the Edinburgh Fringe, 1x01

The only one of the NextUp mixed bills, streamed from this festival, where I enjoyed every act. Judi Love was all right, had some stuff I liked and some that I didn’t, but all three main comedians were really strong. Jin Hao Li’s stuff breaks down into shorter sets surprisingly well, for something with so much structure to the full hour. Ivo Graham, whose shows I did not see in Edinburgh but I heard a preview of his comedy one (he had two shows in Edinburgh this year, comedy and theatre) and it was one of the most boring hours I’ve heard in my entire life, so my expectations weren’t high for him, but on this bill he didn’t do any of the boring story from his comedy hours, he riffed a bit about previous events of the night and it was absolutely hilarious. Sophie Duker was fantastic, she was one of the comedians whom I regretted cutting from my schedule because I just didn’t have enough day to fit her hour in, but sample form it that she gave us here was so much fun and I hope she films the whole thing eventually.

- Lauren Pattison – Big Girl Pants

Copy-pasting from a previous post again. That’ll speed up the process a bit.

It started a little bit slowly, I wasn’t sure about it at first, but she quickly picked up steam and started building on stuff. By the end, so many threads had been tied together, and she’d made me laugh so many times along the way, that I was totally on board for her powerful ending. She did the requisite 40-minute-mark emotional stuff, along with a requisite self-deprecating comment about how she knows it’s cliché to go into an emotional ending at the 40-minute mark, but I thought she also had a very good justification for why she introduced the sad bit at that point in the story (basically, she needed to do all that buildup to give it proper context and meaning), and I thought it worked very well.

Obviously this is also personal, her themes hit some stuff that’s familiar to me, with anxiety and alcohol issues. But I think this show was really well put together no matter who the target audience is. It was smart and funny at the same time (difficult to do), it was structured nicely. It was dark at times but overall hopeful.

- Two Hearts – Til Death Do Us Hearts

Enormous fun right from the first moment, I loved the opening song and then was impressed that they kept up that energy. Most of the songs were good, they did a pretty good job of walking the awkward line that comes from mixing their work with their personal life so closely. It was a show about a wedding and a marriage, which is really not my favourite sort of comedy show, so it’s fucking impressive that they made a show that I liked as much as I did. Objectively this show’s probably about a 9; a show about marriage has to be pretty fucking good to get an 8 in my subjective rating.

- Zoe Coombs Marr – Every Single Thing in My Whole Entire Life

I’ve seen/heard three Zoe Coombs Marr specials before – Dave, Bossy Bottom, and The Opener. They were all ambitious, brilliant, some of my favourites. This one I was not as into as I was with any of those, but still pretty fucking good. If the weakest (in my subjective opinion) show I’ve seen a comedian do still rates an 8/10, they are quite a good comedian. It also had a cool and ambitious premise, putting Zoe’s whole life into a spreadsheet and letting the audience pick stories, but that last part is where it seemed to fall down a bit, as it basically came down to whether the crowd picked funny enough stuff. Which they did sometimes, but didn’t at other times. I really liked the overarching stuff in the show, when Zoe would veer off from audience-selected stuff to discuss, mostly, non-binary identity, their recent mental health breakdown, ADHD, and their love of spreadsheets. I’d have liked to hear more about all those things, but it was still a lot of fun.

7.75

- Amy Annette – Thick Skin

This has something in common with the Two Hearts show, which is that it had to overcome being not my sort of thing, usually, and still became a show I really liked, just by doing it so well. It’s a show about being a teenage girl in the 2000s, but from the perspective of someone who spent those years reading women’s magazines and having crushes on boybands and trying to fit in as a girl. And when I hear comedy material like that, it immediately gives me the anxiety of remembering my time as a teenage girl in the 2000s, where my mother really wanted me to be that, and I wasn’t. And when people do comedy about it there’s often such a strong focus on the relatability of it all, the “the boys have dominated comedy for so long but now we girls get to talk about what our adolescence was like”, and because it wasn’t for me, that feels more alienating to me than hearing a male comedian talk about a male adolescence that I’m not supposed to relate to (though to be honest, male comedians talking about adolescence usually describe years spent being the nerdy kid in school and having crushes on girls who didn’t like them back, which is in fact relatable to me).

I don’t know how to write about this without coming off as a “Not like the other girls” internalized misogyny person. And I don’t mean to be that! I had a little while, when I was a kid, when I was like that. Because I’d see girls with the teen girl magazines, wearing makeup and shaving their legs and being into clothes and shopping, and part of me resented them for being the thing I was supposed to be, or even blamed them, like if they just wouldn’t do these things then my mother would stop expecting me to do them. By my late teens I got into feminist blogs and realized that that’s bullshit, obviously, and they didn’t have it any easier than I did. They were caught up in expectations too, they were navigating really difficult stuff, they definitely weren’t responsible for gender stereotypes. Some of them made fun of me for not wearing the right clothes, but lots of them were happy to get into buying particular clothes as their own hobby, and they didn’t give one fuck if I wanted to exclusively wear boys’ jeans and t-shirts that were several sizes too big for me, and if I resented them for that, then I am the dick in this situation.

I know that now, and in my twenties I made friends with plenty of girls who’d have intimidated me in high school, girls who wore makeup and wore girls’ clothes and shoes and read those magazines. But it did take me a while to get over my issues with them, and I really hate (I hate this about myself, that is, not that I hate the comedy or the comedians for it) the way when I hear a comedian talk about the “teenage girl experience”, especially if they’re around my age, it brings that back and I immediately feel defensive, like I need to justify that not all teen girls were reading Cosmo, even though obviously at no point has Amy Annette said that all teenage girls read Cosmo. She’s just trying to represent some experiences that were very common for many teenage girls and that don’t get talked about all that much (or at least, don’t get talked about in a way that really analyzes them and gives those girls agency and sympathy – they get talked about plenty by people mocking the girls for it), and that is a good thing.

Amy Annette does this thing when she comperes where she asks some woman in the audience what was their favourite teen heartthrob singer they had a crush on in school, and I always want to say “Well Amy, not every woman had a favourite boy band, some people spent their teenage years exclusively listening to Canadian folk music that was mostly made by people who were like 60 years old, and yeah I know that obviously if someone says that from the crowd they’ll sound like an asshole who’s ruining everyone’s by refusing to just play along, but this question puts audience members in a position where they have to either lie about listening to boy bands or ruin everyone’s fun, and it’s not like lying would be a big deal but being in that ‘lie or else you’ll ruin the fun’ position seems a lot like middle school, where I used to Google names of pop bands that I could say if people asked me what music I liked so I wouldn’t embarrass myself by listing folk singers, and I understand that this is cool and relatable for many women but it would be so easy to just ask them for their favourite singer as a teenager rather than making it so specific.”

Okay, those are a lot of reactions to Amy Annette that I have, automatically, due to my own baggage that has nothing to do with her, and isn’t fair to her, and it sucks that this tends to happen to female comedians more than to male ones, that they’ll run up against audience defensiveness because girls get pitted against each other so much that they have automatic defensive reactions to each other, in a way that can also happen with boys but not as often, and then I feel guilty for being part of the problem by having that automatic reaction. But anyway. Once I recognized that that reaction was happening in me again, and I consciously tried to stop it – I realized that Amy Annette’s show is actually a really interesting look at how things weren’t easy on any side, at school. Sure, some girls did not have their mother constantly asking them to start shaving their legs like I did, but they did have some horrifically toxic advice from magazines that they had to figure out at way too young an age, and with growing bodies that could be harmed by dangerous weight-loss culture. Most of them didn’t care what I was wearing because they were too busy trying to keep up with the expectations on themselves.

Amy Annette unpacks this in a way that’s deft, intelligent while coming off as playful and fun, and, once I got past the initial reaction, easy to understand even if it’s not personally relatable. The show is funny, it tackles important issues with a light and irreverent touch, it’s well done. And I’m sorry, Amy Annette, for the years of toxic baggage that meant I couldn’t just say that, instead of writing several paragraphs to navigate through all these other thoughts about some comedy routines on Cosmo magazine’s weight-loss advice.

- Dan Tiernan – Stomp

Okay, that last part was way too long. These need to be shorter. Dan Tiernan’s first hour, in 2023, was good and showed potential. I feel like his second hour develops that potential. Not fully formed, maybe, but more polished in a lot of ways, even while he’s still loud and jerky and way too intense (in a good, if you like that sort of thing, which I do). It matched the intensity of the subject matter, which managed to kick up a few gears from his previous show.

- Mat Ewins – Ewins Some You Lose Some

I should have enjoyed this more than I did. I enjoyed it, obviously, I’ve ranked it above lots of other perfectly good shows. But I know that objectively, as much as comedy can be objective, the thing Mat Ewins does is a extremely cool and exciting and should be rated as one of the best things at the festival. While for me, it was fun, and incredibly technically impressive, but I found that my most frequent reaction was thinking “Wow, that must have been difficult and taken ages to make.” I mean, I did also laugh. And it is my own fault for going to a show that’s known for audience participation, and then getting anxious about all the participation (I didn’t get asked to participate, which is good, but I also didn’t find that much enjoyment in the bits where others participated). It was good. But I didn’t quite get on board with the greatness.

To be fair to Mat, it was the last show I saw live in Edinburgh, and I was very sad about having to leave the next day, so I may not have been fully in the mood for this brand of silliness. I might have enjoyed it more earlier in the week.

- Paul Williams – Mamiya 7

I liked this. It was funny and the songs were fun. It was… I think I made the mistake of getting into this one right after Melanie Bracewell’s, as they were both about solving a mystery by tracking someone remotely, but her story had more to it, so his story seemed weaker by comparison. It doesn’t help that Daniel Kitson once did a show about coming across a camera and tracking down the person who owned it by the pictures in it. Not that the idea’s been stolen or anything – that Kitson show was only ever performed a few times in London and then for one month in the US so it’s very unlikely that Paul Williams has even seen it, and Kitson doesn’t own an idea that broad. The comparison just works out badly for Paul because you don’t want to go up against Kitson on any idea.

I feel like I should be really into Paul Williams’ work. He’s so very good on Taskmaster, and he does the type of nerdy, offbeat comedy that I like. I’ve tried to get into his music before, and that’s just stylistically not for me. While his comedy is… I liked his previous show, In the Moonlight, better than Mamiya 7. And I still liked Mamiya 7. I just don’t like either of them as much as I feel like I should. Mamiya 7 had all the good components, it had whimsical stories that came together nicely and were funny along the way.

I don’t know why I don’t fully connect with Paul Williams’ stuff. Mamiya 7 was good, but it did not turn me into a huge Paul Williams fan the way I’d hoped it might. I love him on Taskmaster, but when it comes to stand-up, to quote the latest NZ season, I prefer the touch of his brother.

- Stuart Goldsmith – Spoilers

Again I’m copy-pasting from a Tumblr post that I wrote just after watching this, to save time.

I like Stuart Goldsmith a lot, as I think he’s one of the best interviewers I’ve ever heard. Probably the best one I’ve ever heard, when it comes to entertainment interviewing. So many things make his podcast (the Comedian’s Comedian) so much better than other comedy interviews. He gets interesting stuff out of his guests because he’s so very informed, so knowledgeable about comedy in general and whomever he’s talking to specifically, so interested in what they have to say, so good at knowing when to add his own thoughts and when to shut up. He’s able to challenge them on stuff, to push back and ask for more detail or to call them out if they’re disingenuous, because he does his research so well. And he talks so insightfully about the processes in writing and delivering stand-up comedy, all the pitfalls and all the best parts. I figured a guy who knows that much about all that must be great at it. I was really interested, the first time I watched one of his stand-up specials.

And I was inevitably disappointed, because obviously that’s too high a bar for anyone to meet. It wasn’t bad. It was a pretty good hour of decent jokes. But I came away disappointed because he hadn’t managed to showcase all the greatest aspects of the entire form in a single set.

Months later I watched another one of his specials, this time with expectations recalibrated to a more reasonable level, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. He did have some good insights, in addition to a bunch of good jokes, he is good at comedy. He’s just not able to live up to what I’d imagined from his interviewing skills.

I knew this show, Spoilers, was supposed to be different from his others – he’d found a niche where he could stand out a bit, in doing a whole show about the climate crisis. I’d been curious for ages to see how he approached that, and now I’ve seen it. And it was… pretty good. Pretty good. It was a good show. It was much better than the many bad shows out there.

Once again, I realized my expectations were too high. Most stand-up hours are themed, but they’ll jump around for topic to topic. I figured a stand-up hour that’s so focused on one topic would have to go deep on that, wouldn’t it? I was looking forward to seeing how much research he’d done, how he’d managed to make all that funny, what new and interesting angles he had.

And that answer to most of that was, not much. I didn’t learn anything about climate change that I didn’t already know. I didn’t see a particularly new perspective. I did wonder if this might be one of those shows that was better in earlier WIP versions than the finished product. I’m thinking of Olga Koch’s current show, which I heard in a couple of early versions and I absolutely loved it, it was complicated and dense and fascinating, but obviously unfinished. I said at the time that once she irons out some of the thornier bits, it’ll be perfect. But then I’ve heard a very recent version, and I think it’s still very very good, but not as good as the earlier one. Because she had ironed out some of the denser stuff, but that meant simplifying things, cutting the more informative and nuanced bits where she couldn’t fit enough jokes. I think her current show, Comes From Money, is one of the best shows I’ve ever heard, in all its forms, and it probably deserves several awards. But turning something into a finished comedy show can dilute the most interesting parts, sometimes.

I have no particular reason to believe that’s what’s happened with this Goldsmith show, except that I feel like a few remnants of some early version might have been left in. Some references he made to how difficult he found it to make dry facts and depressing stats funny, how he’d tried to find quirky ways to make the research more palpable. Maybe this show did once have more of that stuff in it, and he cut it because it wasn’t funny enough. But I think that would make it more interesting.

I’m being unfairly harsh, again, because a guy who knows an incredible amount about comedy took on a very ambitious show theme and that set my expectations too high. It was a good show. It had a little more of what were my favourite things from previous shows I’ve seen him do – the parts where he goes deep into describing the experience of anxiety, and other difficult neurological things. I think that might be what he’s best at, in his own (non-interviewing) work. He’s great at talking about that stuff, finding angles from which to describe it that I’ve not heard before, despite how often it’s discussed in comedy.

7.5

- Caitriona Dowden – Is Holier Than Thou

Of the shows I saw in person, this was pretty much the only one where I took a chance almost completely “blind”. I’d never heard of her before I started looking up comedians who were performing around noon because I had that timeslot to fill on one day (because, to be honest, I heard a preview of Sara Pascoe’s show and decided I definitely do not need to use my noon hour seeing that live, I’ll watch something that at least might be good – nothing against Sara Pascoe in general, I like her stuff and that’s why I’d originally planned to see her in this spot, but my God, is her current show ever not for me). Caitriona’s show blurb seemed mildly interesting, so I looked her up, saw that this was her debut hour and she recently won a student competition. She seemed all right in one short YouTube set, and that was enough for me to put her on my schedule.

It’s probably the only show where I did the Fringe “properly”, using it to discover something totally new to me, rather than just as a chance to see Wumar in person (and I know I should have done more of that stuff rather than the Wumar, but the cross-Atlantic trip was a lot of money, too much money to “punt” on things that might turn out to be shit). I mean, I guess really doing the Fringe properly would be just wandering into something based on who happens to hand me a flyer, but every time I got handed a flyer, I cringed at the thought of being someone who plans a trip so badly that by the time I’m physically on the Royal Mile, there’s still room in my schedule for a flyer to make a difference.

Anyway. Caitriona Dowden was good. Not better than the well-established acts that I’m a big fan of, but better than all the shows that weren’t very good, and better than some shows that actually were pretty good. She had this really deadpan delivery that occasionally crossed the line into just seeming flat, but she was saying interesting enough stuff for that type of delivery to sort of work, a funny contrast to her material and she didn’t risk losing my interest. She had a solid premise, suggesting that she wants to get canonized as a Catholic saint and then going through how she could meet the criteria, which let her both weave in stories from her own life, and do esoteric material about Catholic doctrine. I enjoyed both those sides of the show, and how neatly the fit together. The whole show felt neat. They had a big thing of paper and marker instead of a projection screen, which combined with the small dark room behind a pub to give the whole thing a cool underground feel. I would be interested in seeing more stuff by her.

- Harriet Kemsley – Everything Always Works Out for Me

Again, I shall copy/paste some bits a previous Tumblr post:

I’ll be honest – I was a bit disappointed by this. I’d actually booked tickets to this one live because I had such high expectations for it, though I ended up skipping it when I learned that I could see it on NextUp instead (and by a nice coincidence, Harriet Kemsley happened to cancel the night I was going to see it so I got a refund). I was excited for it because I find Harriet Kemsley incredibly funny on panel shows, one of the funniest people they can ever have on. I watched her 2023 stand-up special Woman Child and thought it was pretty good, but I didn’t enjoy her as much as I do on panel shows. I found some parts of that show very funny, but other parts not so much, and the ones I enjoyed the least were the domestic bits about being married and complaining about her husband.

That’s not necessarily Harriet Kemsley’s fault; I happen to have fairly low tolerance for comedy about romantic relationships, unless they’re saying something really new. I think it’s very difficult to write an interesting or original show about that stuff when there’s so little that’s new to say. But I probably dislike that stuff more than is objectively reasonable, as it’s not relatable to me. I don’t do dating and hardly ever do relationships, and when comedians talk about that stuff, I usually have the same reactions as when people in my real life talk about it, which is – you know you don’t have to, right? Yeah, all those aspects to dating and relationships and weddings sound really annoying and frustrating. Just don’t do it then, if it’s that bad.

I have heard some great stand-up hours about dating and relationships, but they are far outnumbered by the shit ones. I tend to be more partial to their opposite. Breakup shows can be boring for similar reasons – it’s such a common topic that it’s all been said before – but at least those make sense to me. Someone tells me how much something in their life sucked, I think “Well stop doing it then”, and then they tell me they did stop doing it and here’s the story of how that happened. It seems like a reasonable course of action, so I can enjoy the show about what a reasonable thing they did.

So for all those reasons, when I heard some Harriet Kemsley material in early 2024 about her recent divorce, I suddenly became much more interested in seeing her in Edinburgh. It sounded much more fun to hear her complain about her ex-husband, than to hear her complain about her husband. And not just because I have also always found Bobby Mair fairly annoying. I’m always down for a breakup show.

And the breakup show parts of this were fun. A lot of it was fun, it was a good show. Just not quite as good as I was expecting, largely because there were so many dating stories. How do people have time for so much dating? I found those really boring, and there were a whole bunch of them. All the stuff about dating that needs to be said has already been said. People don’t need to say more stuff about it.

But some parts of this show, like the previous show, I liked a lot. The stuff about her own mindset, letting us in a bit on what’s behind the extremely daft panel show persona, was interesting and got very funny at times. There was some gossipy stuff about a book that I assume was the Seann Walsh one, though I don’t care quite enough to actually look it up, and parts of that were quite funny though other parts dragged a bit. I liked some of her stories about trying to awkwardly co-parent post-divorce.

So it was a good show, but it wasn’t quite the show I was hoping for. A lot of the most interesting threads, like what goes on in her mind to make her this way, or how her divorce might connect to those things, were sort of left hanging. And it’s her choice and totally fair if she didn’t want to go that deep into some of those things, but that did leave her show a bit more broad and not as compelling. But honestly, I think I’d have enjoyed the show a lot without the dating stories. As it was, I still enjoyed the show quite a bit, but there were too many parts that dragged.

- Rob Auton – The Eyes Open and Shut Show

I like Rob Auton; I’ve heard him do a few things that I found utterly brilliant, captivating, beyond whimsical and into immersive whisking me away through the worlds he created. There were several times times when this show achieved that, and it was wonderful. There were other, longer times when it was pretty good, not anything really special but nice, relaxing, whimsical humour. And there were a few times when it dragged for a bit and I had trouble maintaining focus on it.

This is a weird thing to be an issue, but – okay, I’m not good enough at parsing audio to be able to tell whether he happens to have the exact same specific accent as Alun Cochrane, or whether he has the same style of delivering material as Alun Cochrane. It’s definitely at least one of those things, and I think it might be both. I think it maybe has to be both, for hearing his voice give me such overwhelmingly strong “This sounds exactly like Alun Cochrane” vibes to actually be a distraction. Particularly because the material is so different from anything Alun Cochrane’s done (both pre-2018 Alun Cochrane, back when he was cool and quite funny, and the more recent Alun Cochrane, now that he sucks on a number of levels), so my brain is trying to enjoy the Rob Auton experience, but in this show he keeps telling us to close our eyes, and if I listen to him talk while I have my eyes closed, all I can think is “It’s fucking weird to hear Alun Cochrane be so whimsical.”

- Rosco McClelland – Sudden Death

This is one I watched just because it streamed on NextUp, as I’d never heard of the guy before, but I quite liked it. He certainly had an original angle for the show, discussing his very rare and likely fatal heart condition, and getting into some stuff that’s tough to even imagine having to think about, like how living with that condition affects his choices about relationships and potentially having kids. That's a fucking intense USP.

He also gets into some pretty hard-hitting political stuff. And yet, the show is funny. Dark humour, obviously, but not the racial slur kind, just the “I could die at any moment” kind. Puts all those racial slur-saying edgelord comedians to shame, with his level of dark humour. It made me laugh, it made me think, it made me uncomfortable, it covered some important issues. Good show.

7.25

- Stuart Laws – Has to Be Joking

I’ve felt for a while like I should like Stuart Laws. All the comedians I like rate him, he’s in the acknowledgements of everyone else’s stand-up show as a producer or whatever he does, and I got the impression that he’s the vaguely nerdy comic type I like, and he’s autistic. Because of this, I’d started watching some of his older NextUp shows a couple of times before, feeling like I should enjoy them. But for whatever reason, I failed to get into it, and never watched past the first five or so minutes. I’ve always assumed that if I gave his stuff more of a chance I’d probably like it, I just need to watch it at a time when I’m in the mood for something that might take more than few minutes to pick up.

So I watched his full show from 2024. And it was… fine. It was fine. Some parts were pretty funny. Some observations were interesting. It was well put together, structure-wise. It just… often felt like he had all the components of a good comedy show, and had put them together in a by-the-numbers way that worked, but never really took off. Which was the same feeling I got from his previous shows. I should really connect with his material, but for some reason I just don’t.

Maybe it doesn’t help that this was a show about his relationship? But most of it wasn’t even about that, it was mostly about going through life while autistic, which is obviously a topic that’s of interest to me. And I even liked what he had to say about it, this running metaphor about playing with all your cards once you know how your own mind works. I thought the metaphor worked, though it did feel slightly tacked on at the end, like he could have done more with it.

I don’t know what it was. Some of his jokes were funny. The thing as a whole just didn’t quite land for me. I still think I should try his older shows at some point, see if I can get into those more easily.

There’s some comedian gossip there too, as in 2023, American comedian Chloe Radcliffe streamed her Edinburgh hour on NextUp. I watched it, it was about how she cheated on all her partners because her dad didn’t love her. It was an interesting hour, I think, though I had to really work on the open mind thing to try to see that from her perspective (fair enough, some of my favourite comedians have cheated on their partners – realistically probably most of my favourite comedians have cheated on their partners and just choose not to tell everyone – though Mark Watson didn’t write a whole show trying to justify it). Though once I did that, it was an interesting show. In 2024, Stuart Laws wrote a show about how he also saw that Chloe Radcliffe show in 2023, and shortly after that, began a relationship with her, and wants to tell us about his new girlfriend and autism diagnosis. It was an odd perspective, the way he tried really hard to fuse those two concepts together. I guess it kind of worked.

- Elsa McTaggart – Caledonia

This was a concert of traditional Scottish music, not comedy; I’ve only included it in the spreadsheet for completism, so I can have all the shows I saw in Edinburgh on there. I mostly stuck to comedy on my Edinburgh schedule, but I was raised on folk music, particularly Celtic and Celtic-inspired stuff, have been a huge fan of Scottish folk music since I was very small, and I could not miss the opportunity to see some live during my first-ever trip to Scotland. This show was lovely, they played a few songs and tunes that I knew and some more than I didn’t, I liked them all. I nearly started crying when they played Dougie McLean’s Caledonia, as that’s a song that I’ve always associated with my grandparents’ house by the ocean in Nova Scotia. It was a nice hour.

- Judi Love (MC), Chris Cantrill, Huge Davies, Kemah Bob – ITVX Presents Live Comedy from the Edinburgh Fringe, 1x03

Chris Cantrill of course was good, Kemah Bob was great and made me wish I’d been able to see her full show (it was on my long list and I just couldn’t fit it into the final schedule). I was a bit disappointed that Huge Davies only did material from his 2023 show, even though I liked that 2023 show a lot, because he was another person who got cut from my schedule of people to see at the last minute (replaced with Natalie Palamides), and I was interested in seeing a bit of what he was doing this year, but he didn’t do that. I mean, what he did was funny – his 2023 show is on YouTube and it’s great. So overall the show was pretty good. I’ve rated it a bit lower than I’d rate any of the individual performances, because a cut-down set for a mixed bill is (almost) never as good as a full hour. But this was a pretty good show.

- Judi Love (MC), Colin Hoult, Josh Jones, Katie Norris – ITVX Presents Live Comedy from the Edinburgh Fringe, 1x04

I didn’t much like Colin Hoult’s set, though I might by biased by how annoying I find the Anna Mann character, so I was just predisposed to find Colin Hoult annoying too. Katie Norris I’d never heard before and I liked her a lot – that’s the sort of thing you want to get out of a mixed bill livestream, finding a new person to be interested in seeing more of in the future. Katie Norris definitely became that. And Josh Jones was pretty good, better than I’d been expecting.

- Elsa McTaggart – Hebridean Fire

This was another music concert, lovely Scottish traditional music that I’m really glad I saw live when I had the chance, included on the spreadsheet for completism.

- Judi Love (MC), Chloe Petts, Jack Skipper, Jason Byrne – ITVX Presents Live Comedy from the Edinburgh Fringe, 1x02

Chloe Petts was also on my list of people I wanted to see when I went into the festival, and I just couldn’t fit her into my schedule. So I was glad I got the chance to see her and I ended up liking her a lot, even more than I’d expected to. She was great. Jason Byrne was also pretty funny, better than I’d expected. Though I was basing my expectations on my previous knowledge of him, which is mainly from around 2006 (not that my previous knowledge of him made me think he was bad, just sort of solidly average), so it was nice to see he’s still fun. Jack Skipper brought the average down a lot, I could not stand that guy.

- Monkey Barrel Big Show – Garrett Millerick (MC), Alexandra Haddow, Micky Overman, Ed Night, Tom Ballard

Obviously I quite enjoyed Ed Night and Tom Ballard, particularly Ed Night, in this. I quite like Micky Overman and she made me laugh several times. Alexandra Haddow I found disappointing, I liked her 2023 show but this one wasn’t really for me. And I found the host incredibly annoying, which brought the average score down.

6.75

- Aaron Simmonds – Harry Potter or My Girlfriend... Who Do I Love More?

Now that I see this in the context of where I rated similar shows, I think I rated this one too low, it should be in the 7s somewhere. Because it was a good show and I had a good time there. It’s just that I went to see it because I’d enjoyed his NextUp special, Disabled Coconut, and then this show ended up being mostly recycled stuff from Disabled Coconut, with a few Harry Potter references tacked on.

He was open about that being a gimmick, and I think it makes sense. He said he was writing a show of new material that he’d do in the second half of the festival, after spending the first half doing a free show with the “Harry Potter” thing to draw in nerds who might not have heard of him but would like the “Harry Potter” in the programme and come check it out. And would hopefully use the exposure he got from that to bring in people for his new show later. It’s fair enough, especially since his first show was free (though of course I gave him some money at the end). I don’t know how that second show worked out for him because it started after I left the festival; I’d have gone to see it if I’d had the chance.

It's not a bad idea, probably, as a way to draw an audience if you’re not already really established. I mean, he’s not un-established, I watched his NextUp special because I liked him on The Russell Howard Hour, but he doesn’t have a lot of credits besides that. The Harry Potter thing was a gimmick but still used pretty well, he’d threaded the references throughout and tied them all together, rather than just tacking on a few mentions of it. And, as someone who was deeply obsessed with Harry Potter for several years of my childhood and knew all the trivia, I was pretty impressed by his knowledge of it; he wasn’t just using the popular IP, he had put in the hours on that. I was also pleased that he immediately clarified that when he says “Harry Potter”, he meant books, not movies. And of course I was pleased that he clarified quite early on, that when he says “Harry Potter”, he means intellectual property that he paid for years ago and the author in recent years can fuck off. That got a big cheer in the room, the crowd were clearly all on the same page as fans of the stories, not the author.

Anyway, it was a fun time to revisit my childhood in the Harry Potter fandom with all his references to it, and Disabled Coconut was a good show and it was fun to see that stuff again. He created a fun atmosphere in the room, and to someone who’s not seen his previous show, it would rank higher than a 6.75/10. I’d just heard the stories before.

- Bronwyn Kuss – Sounds Good

This was fine. There wasn’t a single joke in that made me really, properly laugh. But nearly every joke made me go “Oh, that was all right.” It was fine. I was pleased, however, to have further confirmation for my theory that there are no straight Australian comedians.

- Mark Silcox – Women Only

I wanted to like this one more, as he had an entertaining gimmick with the extreme deadpan delivery. He delivered this show like a lecture, where the joke was that it was presented in an intentional parody of a boring talk, with a slideshow. And there were times during this show when I found what he was doing quite funny. It’s just… maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for it, but he did such a good job of pretending to be boring that it was, at times, boring. When he had my attention, he made me laugh. A few times he got quite good laughs out of me. It’s just that much of the rest of the show dragged. It felt quite long and it was hard to pay attention.

6.5

- Tarot – Shuffle

I found a few of their sketches funny. I found a bunch of their sketches not funny. I wondered if my problem with it was just that I’m not into sketch comedy enough, but then BriTANick made me giggle like a teenage and I thought no, it’s their problem. It wasn’t awful overall, it wasn’t great.

Which is too bad because as I’ve said I like Kiri Pritchard-McLean a lot, and I know she writes on this sketch group. I don’t know any of the people who actually perform in the group, besides Edward Easton, who played James Acaster in James Acaster’s sitcom (and in Rose Matafeo’s sitcom). This particular show did not turn me into a fan of theirs.

- Thom Tuck and friends – ACMS

Thom Tuck was great fun. It was a cool thing in the middle of the night and it felt like experiencing the Fringe. Thom Tuck was great fun. Being there for all their little ACMS in-jokes was cool. Thom Tuck was great fun. Jin Hao Li came on first and he made me laugh so hard even though I’d already heard all his punchlines several hours before at his own show. Then a succession of other people came on, and a couple of them were all right but most I did not enjoy. I think that’s sort of what ACMS is supposed to be like, though, which is all right. I didn’t really mind the ones that I didn’t enjoy. Thom Tuck was great fun.

6.25

- Live from the Big Cave – Mark Watson (MC), Kate Cheka, Kate Hammer, Adam Knox, Oliver Coleman, Plastic Jesus, Aidan Sadler

I quite enjoyed Mark Watson. I’d never heard of any of the other performers. I liked a couple of them but wasn’t into most of them, I can’t remember which ones I did and didn’t like, and given how long I have already spent writing this post, I absolutely cannot be bothered to go back and check.

- Jessie Cave – An Ecstatic Display

Oh God, Jessie Cave. I’ve got to admit that I find both Jessie Cave and Alfie Brown, in some ways, annoyingly interesting, even though I do not want to. I do not watch reality TV, but occasionally being into the comedy of Jessie Cave and/or Alfie Brown is probably the closest I come to that.

…I nearly referenced Roast Battle just now, saying that being into their soap opera comedy is about on the level of Roast Battle in terms of stuff I’ve watched while knowing that this is shit, but then I remembered that they have, in fact, gone on Roast Battle together. And, fun fact, of all the UK Roast Battle couples (Sarah Keyworth/Catherine Bohart, Harriet Kemsley/Bobby Mair), they’re the only one that’s together now, so I guess they won Roast Battle. Good for them. Fucking hell.

I realized a while ago that if Alfie Brown were not a comedian, or some other public figure where we could recognize his identity, I’d probably assume Jessie Cave was a character. A young comedian who got her big acting break in Harry Potter, and then figured the best way to use that in her live comedy career would be to become her Harry Potter character on stage. She played Lavender Brown in Harry Potter – a character who’s been accused of being a misogynistic stereotype because she’s so over-the-top “girly”, and that’s connected to her being silly and airheaded, and the only time she becomes a major character is when she gets into a relationship where she’s a toxic possessive girlfriend. I would assume that Jessie Cave thought it would be interesting to just keep playing that character on stage, and to even give her love interest the last name “Brown”, as a little in-joke, that all she wants to do is marry him so she could have the same last name as her Harry Potter character. I think that sort of character comedy… it would get grating after a while, being a character who’s that annoying, but that could be funny for a bit.

But it’s not a character. I mean I’m sure it’s exaggerated and written for the stage the way any stand-up persona is, but it’s not a character. Because Alfie Brown exists and his stories match up with hers. I mean, I like the idea that Alfie Brown and Jessie Cave have been in a stable, happy relationship for ten years, and they’re just playing out this soap opera of a toxic relationship between two awful people, on stage/social media, because they realized it’ll generate no end of material for both of them. But that’s obviously not the case. It’s real, and that makes it seem like something that people shouldn’t just watch like it’s a soap opera.

So given all of that… I watched her 2024 show because it streamed on NextUp (I didn't actually pay money to see Jessie Cave of Alfie Brown in Edinburgh - when I say I find them weirdly interesting I mean I've occasionally spent a few minutes thinking about it, not that I'd ever actually choose to go see it, and in fact I almost didn't watch the Jessie Cave show when it streamed because I thought it would be bad, but I watched it due to my Edinburgh NextUp stream completism), and it was better than I expected. My expectations were very low, and Jessie Cave exceeded them. It had some interesting observations, some insights into why someone would stay in a situation like that. Some descriptions and observations that I find deeply unrelatable, but that became interesting in its own way, trying to understand such a person, as she opened herself up to show us what it’s like.

It definitely didn’t make me laugh at any point. But Jessie Cave is clearly a talented writer, performer, and storyteller, and that came through, even if the material was fucking bleak. It was interesting to watch. I think I might have enjoyed this a fair bit, if I’d thought it were fiction.

- Stephen Buchanan – Charicature

Scottish guy I’d not heard of before, who streamed his show on NextUp. It was okay. It had a gimmick where he kept switching between himself on stage and videos of stuff he’d filmed beforehand, with a “twist” ending in which it all came together, which was kind of fun. A lot of the material that got slotted into that structure wasn’t stuff I enjoyed much, but the structure was fun. I found him likeable.

5.75

- Seymour Mace – Seymour F*cking Mace You C*nts!

I wasn’t in the right mood for this one. I put it on my list because I wanted to try to expand my horizons and understand the alt-comedy clowning or whatever, but I also put it on the last day of the festival when I was sad about having to leave soon, and that is not the right mood for enjoying this extremely silly show. There was only one part that I properly liked, which was a game near the beginning that people played with the word “cunt”. That was the highlight, it was downhill from there. There were several puppets. I do not like puppets. The overall energy was fun at times, but I wasn’t into it.

- Tony Law – The Law Also Rises

Before he went right-wing, I felt like I should be able to enjoy his stuff, he’s the cool alternative guy that Stewart Lee likes. And I didn’t hate it, I sometimes found him funny, but other times I had to try to see what’s funny about it, because as I’ve said before, I am not a cool person who always “gets” alt-comedy stuff. Then I found out he’s in with the Comedy Unleased crowd and I stopped feeling bad about not always understanding his schtick.

If I’d been more on board with his persona from the beginning, I probably could have enjoyed this show. It only had a couple of references to how the woke cancel culture nanny state are ruining our lives, so I guess that could have been worse. I genuinely did try to watch it with as much of an open mind/lack of prejudice due to his political views that I could manage, and because of that, I did find a few bits of it funny. It’s certainly interesting, what he does. But overall, not for me.

4.75

- Anesti Danelis – Artificially Intelligent

A guy I’d never heard of who streamed on NextUp. It was a show about AI and internet comedy. Some of it he claims was actually written by AI, and even if he was lying, just making that claim (in a way that didn’t seem to be joking) was enough to knock my rating of the show way down. It felt like internet comedy trying to be live comedy – which, to be fair, can be fun. I did not find it fun in this instance.

4.5

- Kavin Jay – Unsolicited Advice

A guy I’d never heard of who streamed on NextUp. Did a lot of material that felt pretty hack to me, very little that seemed original or interesting in any way.

3.75

- Dan Willis – Cobra Kai, the Way of the Comic

It could have been good! I can think of so many ways that this show could have been good! There are so many ways to tie the themes in Cobra Kai into real life, in interesting and insightful ways. The inter-generational trauma, the complexities of interactions across socio-economic class, the role of sport in society, the transcendence of high school stereotypes, the way our past always shapes our future, the changing media and cultural norms that shows in the differences between the original movies and the TV show a few decades later, and that’s just for a start. But he didn’t do any of that, which made me mark this show down even lower than it maybe deserved, because I was so annoyed about the wasted potential. It was just a gimmick to get in fans of Cobra Kai, like what Aaron Simmonds did with Harry Potter, but unlike Aaron Simmonds, this wasn’t a way to advertise another show, and it wasn’t wrapped around a bunch of strong material. It was just the gimmick, wrapped around boring material. And, unlike Aaron Simmonds, he didn’t even impress me with especially in-depth knowledge of the source material.

3.25

- Takashi Wakasugi – Welcome to Japan

A lot of material that I’d expect to hear from a comedian who was doing a parody of the hack, overused observational stand-up comedy tropes from 30 years ago. Except this wasn’t a parody. There were so many observations about food, and I so don’t care about food-based comedy.

- Some Theatre Kids – NewsRevue

I found this as un-funny as some of the other shows to which I’ve given low ratings, but I’ve rated it even lower than them because I also found it frustrating that it tackled such serious issues so badly. It’s one thing to make boring observations about sandwiches or whatever, it’s another thing to do bad parodies of political issues that have ruined and cost innocent lives. I love political comedy, and I don’t know where the line is between “using humour to skewer bad people and policies and ideas in politics”, versus “treating serious situations like a joke”. But this felt like the second thing, and I really disliked it.

…I feel bad for writing that when it was just young people making theatre and I'm really not the target audience for it. I mean it streamed on NextUp so it's got to be fair game to critcize, but still, I'm sure there are people who like this sort of thing. Also, I really can't justify why I think it's all right for people to shout my own political opinions at me in a political stand-up show but it seems crass to display them in a musical, so, you do you, I guess.

2.5

- Michelle Shaugnesy – Too Late, Baby

I hated this, but now I sort of feel like I probably hated it because I’m too judgemental, and I feel bad that I was mean about the theatre kids before, so I won’t be mean again and go into detail about why I hated this. I actually also did go into that detail in a Tumblr post I wrote right after I saw it, no need to get into all that again. It wasn’t my thing.

- Bonus list: shows that are not on the spreadsheet because I haven’t heard versions of them that were performed at the Edinburgh Festival, but I have heard versions that were performed quite near the Edinburgh Festival, so no far off from were like in Edinburgh.

Shows that I thought were good:

- Olga Koch

Incredibly intelligent show about a complex issues that still managed to be packed with good jokes, criminally overlooked for awards this year, I thought.

- Greg Larsen

Some material recycled from his last couple of shows but I didn’t mind because that material was so funny, also lots of new stuff that was also funny, his usual level of dark and consistently hard-hitting humour.

- Fern Brady

Interesting and funny observations that make me laugh in autistic perspective.

- Patti Harrison

Wild, off the wall hour that did not slow down and made me laugh repeatedly.

- Guy Montgomery

Just enormous fun, observational comedy/wordplay, and describing it that way should mean it's conventional and boring but it's so much the opposite of that, so much fun, I really enjoyed it.

Shows that I thought were not good:

There are a few in this category, shows where I heard a preview and thought “I have no desire to see that again”. I’ve already referred to a couple of them, but I figure there’s no need to list any others, as I already feel bad for being a dick about the theatre kids and some of the other shows that I didn’t enjoy. So I’ll leave it at this.

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