Joe Kent-Walters has been given the DLT Entertainment Best Newcomer Award in the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and deservedly so, for Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!!! The show is a blast.It's set in a working men's club in Rotherham which has seen better days, as has its MC, Frankie Monroe. (This device is much helped by the show being performed late at night in an overheated, low-ceilinged basement room at Monkey Barrel.)What we soon come to realise is the weird-looking Frankie, who for some (unexplained) reason appears throughout with his face covered in Sudocrem, has long ago Read more ...

Amy Gledhill won the Don and Eleanor Taffner Best Comedy Show, the main award at the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Make Me Look Fit on the Poster. The show has variously been described as “bawdy comedy delivered with a blush”, “a funny woman rightly confident of her comedy talents” and “a brilliant physical comedian”.Accepting her award, Gledhill said: “This is insane. I saw the other people on this list and I thought, 'I don't have to write a script!'”Gledhill originally came to Edinburgh fame as one half of the sketch duo The Delightful Sausage, with Chris Cantrill, who was also Read more ...

Grace Mulvey, Assembly Roxy ★★★ Grace Mulvey has been single for five years, she tells us at the top of the show, a matter of some disappointment to her mother back in Dublin. Even moving to London two years ago didn't change her dating status, despite the best efforts of her flatmates. But then, they're lesbians and she's straight, so maybe their advice isn't quite hitting the spot.Mulvey's debut show, Tall Baby, covers a lot of territory, but fortunately she talks at a million miles an hour: she mentions her previous career in tech, dealing with the British public in a deadend job to Read more ...

Sheeps, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★This is the first new show that Sheeps – Liam Williams, Al Roberts and Daran Johnson  – have produced in six years, but they say The Giggle Bunch (That's Our Name For You) is their last. Having gone their separate ways some years ago, the trio have gathered together for one last time to say farewell to their fans.Keen followers will savour every minute of the show, of course, while neutral observers might pick holes in some of the hour's content. Sheeps have always played with – actually disregarded might be a better description – the rules Read more ...

Stevie Martin, Monkey Barrel ★★★ Stevie Martin is part of the generation of comics for whom the internet is a natural home; she has racked up tens of millions of views for her work online, where she had to strut her stuff when the world went into lockdown.But having debuted as a solo comic in 2018 (after being one-third of the talented sketch group Massive Dad) she wants the thrill – and the exertion – of appearing before a live audience again, she says, so here is Clout, a tightly constructed hour of comedy full of ideas, not all of which land.Recently acquired habits die hard; Read more ...

Chris Grace, Assembly George Square ★★★★ How do you produce laughs out of grief and loss? Well Chris Grace does, and then some, in Sardines (A Comedy About Death). The American actor, well known to Fringe regulars as a member of improv group Baby Wants Candy, structures the show almost as a thought experiment; can you enjoy something when you know how it's going to end? And does art actually help us deal with a complex issue such as bereavement?In a clever conceit, he mimes drawing an oblong shape that he says is a screen, and then mimes a shape that he says is a projector – “They Read more ...

Emma Sidi Is Sue Gray Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★I have no idea what Sue Gray - the former senior civil servant who is now The Prime Minister’s right-hand woman - sounds like, but I’m guessing not someone who has stepped straight out of The Only Way Is Essex.Hilariously, and to great effect, that is character comic Emma Sidi’s presentation of a woman finding herself at the heart of government without really knowing why.“The last four years have been mental!” says “Sue Gray” as she introduces herself - Sue Gray refers to herself in the third person frequently, and always with her full name Read more ...

Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel @ The Hive ★★★★ Eric Rushton tells us he has enough cash on him to return the price of one person’s ticket if they don’t like what’s about to follow. No one takes up the offer, although I suspect a few in the audience may have taken a few minutes to tune into his individual style of comedy.Essentially Real One is a shaggy dog story that uses a surreal hook – a vivid dream the comic had about the actress Margot Robbie – to examine regrets, embarrassment and a life that’s yet to take off.Rushton intersperses his account of that dream – in which he managed to Read more ...

Anna Akana, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ If you like morbid humour, you’ve come to the right place. Asian American comic Anna Akana, a YouTube star making her Fringe debut, dives in at the deep end with It Gets Darker, which deals with, inter alia, her sister’s suicide.But before we get there, Akana sets the scene. She has returned to comedy after several years away, having left the scene because she was threatened by a long-term stalker who the LAPD told her they couldn’t arrest until he did something. As awful as it was, she acknowledges that having a stalker is great material for a comic. “My Read more ...

Jin Hao Li Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Jin Hao Li was born in China, raised in Singapore and studied English at a Scottish university. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, in drawing on so many cultural sources, his brand of comedy should be so singular.Swimming in a Submarine, his debut Fringe show, is a deftly constructed hour in which Li mixes surreal invention, zinging one-liners, callbacks, hokey rap and some rather disconcerting audience interaction.He certainly knows how to make an impression. He comes on stage to loud metal music but then speaks  softly – which forms a great Read more ...

Rahul Subramanian is a well-established comic in his native Mumbai, as evidenced by the appreciative audience of Indian expats gathered at Soho Theatre. His sellout dates in London acted as previews to his debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe, which starts on 2 August.Subramanian is one of several South Asian comics Soho Theatre has introduced to London and Edinburgh comedy fans, and it's a mutually productive arrangement; last year, Urooj Ashfaq, another star of the Mumbai standup scene whom the theatre promoted in the UK, made her Fringe debut and walked away with the best newcomer gong at the Read more ...

Hannah Berner isn't a big name in stand-up (yet), but she's well known enough in the United States to have come to Netflix's attention. Her fame comes from TikTok and Instagram (where she has three million followers), her podcasts and formerly being a cast member of the Bravo reality series Summer House. We Ride at Dawn is her first, but I suspect not her last, Netflix special.In the stand-up hour filmed at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, the Brooklyn-born comic muses on a range of subjects – mostly sex, politics and relationships – but also riffs on Disney princes and the things that annoy her Read more ...