Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: Emma Holland | Jodie Sloan | Kathy Maniura | Max Fulham | Amy Annette + morę
In our critics’ latest Fringe round-up, a multimedia stand-up show about art demonstrates a mastery of craft, while the ‘Taylor Swift of comedy’ reckons with her own TikTok fame
Emma Holland: Don't Touch My Trinkets ★★★★☆
Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 24 August
From the elaborate, extended silliness of her walk-on, Emma Holland's latest show is an overwhelmingly successful attempt at wrongfooting and delighting the audience. A series of little tricks and cons, rather like the magic she so despises. But it's also testimony to the power of art to tell a story. Instilled in her by a childhood visit to the Capitoline Museums in Rome and the dressing down she received whilst there for touching a piece, the Australian comic has revered art ever since.
Don't Touch My Trinkets is a true multi-media arrangement, with Holland relating her story through four works she's created commemorating emotive points in her life. Further incorporating a screen and abundant sound cues, it's a rich and layered confection that starts to speak to the question of what art is for, even as Holland consistently rug-pulls and feigns sincerity. And while it touches on the morality of absorbing and exploiting others' stories and experiences for commercial gain and power, it's chiefly spoofing the look-at-me supremacy of the artist's ego.
Holland is by turns goofy, charming and thunderously vexed, frustrated by her nemeses. Yet you rarely get a sense of lingering anguish; she's too openly manipulative and prioritising of the laugh for that. Previous shows have seen her be more personable, seeking to forge connections with the audience. Here, she only affects to do that, skewering the artistic need to control everything and bulldozing through her intricately plotted presentation, a little crazed and wild-eyed.
The show is weighty, with a wide variety of jokes that foreshadow and hark back to others. And it's well paced too, with quickie, almost subliminal, gags slipped in on occasion and others left to simmer, and be savoured, for longer. Though she often pretends otherwise, Holland is an act in absolute mastery of her craft.
JAY RICHARDSON
Jodie Sloan: Is She Hot? ★★★☆☆
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 24 August
A compelling reclaiming of personal narrative, Jodie Sloan's Fringe debut begins with a dark disclaimer, tempering her not entirely unfounded claim to be the Taylor Swift of comedy. At best dismissed as “cute and sexy and Canadian”, at worst the ukulele-playing comic who became a case study in what happens when a Gen Z performer has the glare of the internet's judgement shone upon them.
She opens with the catchy, gently witty song with which she went viral, Is He Hot?, having attracted more than five million views on TikTok. A follow-up female version attracted a further million. Yet for reasons best know to the capricious algorithms of the shadowy Chinese military app, TikTok then effectively turned her into a survey, soliciting viewers to rate her personal hotness. Having been bombarded with attention and abuse from trolls, she retreated to the relatively safe space of her pre-teen diaries, finding little consolation in the family trauma she dug up.
After arriving in Scotland by way of Australia, Sloan has an assurance and steeliness that belies her 28 years and circumstances, with her tale also encompassing grief, massive insecurities and a realignment of her sexuality. She's come out the other side stronger, a flourishing songwriter who can capably mix the comic with the bleak.
JAY RICHARDSON
Kathy Maniura: The Cycling Man ★★★☆☆
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 24 August
Devoting a full hour to her most established creation, ‘The Cycling Man’, leftfield character comic and drag king Kathy Maniura fleshes out the backstory of the lycra-clad boor at his lowest ebb. Recently separated from his long-suffering wife, oblivious snob Oliver Greaves crashes his beloved bike and wakes up in an emergency room. Demanding attention, the posh, vainglorious fool abuses the captivity of his audience to acquaint them with his achievements, not least the epiphany of when he joined his North London cycling club of fellow middle-aged braggarts on wheels.
As a portrait of a certain kind of posh, absurdly puffed-up man, out of touch with emotions and family, Oliver is a grotesque caricature. Even as his world collapses around him, he perceives the wreck of his marriage through graphs and management jargon, finding his safe space wrapped in the Financial Times. With his character largely established in his unwitting testimony, the extent of his self-awareness is a little inconsistent. His redemption arc is overlong. And a conceit of using a GoPro camera strapped to his helmet to supplement his direct address is only partially successful. Still, Maniura understatedly makes some satirical points about class and gender and she imbues him with a pathos he doesn't deserve.
JAY RICHARDSON
Max Fulham: Full of Ham ★★★☆☆
Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August
Max Fulham fully appreciates that ventriloquism retains some creaky throwback, end-of-the-pier associations. And he's not above indulging some of these musichall aspects, not least in the polished skill with which he brings his puppets to life, and the boyish amiability with which he seeks to entertain.
Updating the art to the 21st century, with similarly tidy sound cues and prop-based interaction, he's a solid rather than spectacular comedian however. Attesting to his relative youth, he introduces the puppet that got him into venting as a nine-year-old by shamelessly playing up the sentimentality of its formative importance. He also spends a chunk of this show with his plainer-speaking grandfather, the licence of age allowing the puppet to be more forthright than he can be.
Probably Fulham's best characters are the least obvious: the recurring, supermarket self-serve checkout beep with which he introduces the temptation of criminality, and a rogue box that threatens to divulge his secrets, generally offer sardonic commentary on his act.
Fulham's more than willing to make himself look daft, committing hard to the visual gag of his show title, for example. But a birthday party routine in which he solicits gifts from the audience lags terribly. And his punchlines aren't quite plentiful enough yet.
JAY RICHARDSON
Amy Annette: Busy Body ★★★☆☆
Pleasance Courtyard (33) Until 24 August
Not having nieces or nephews doesn’t stop Amy Annette from having “fun aunt” energy, she tells us, and we quickly see why. In the entertainingly recognisable picture she paints of how such a relative behaves at a wedding, she sets out what a good time we’re going to have with her in Busy Body.
In a dark little room brightened up with flowers and patterned fabric, Annette is a breath of fresh air, dipping in and out of observations on everything from popular culture to childhood interests that had her labelled as an “old soul”. Along the way we’re treated to some nice material about the Earl of Sandwich and the darker context of his lunchtime legacy, the way she geekily quoted a Shakespeare sonnet during a sexual encounter and an academic study that aimed to justify why men can’t see things domestically.
In an hour that skips along happily, she also muses upon becoming British (she’s half-Canadian, half-American) enough to know that Jane is the one with the “sad little life” and to be able to provide a cultural analysis of Mr Blobby, as well as touching upon ideas of body image and which contemporary pop star would be a World War II collaborator.
You can take anyone to this show and they’ll have a lovely time.
ASHLEY DAVIES
Oh God, Not Another Bloody Sonnet Show ★★★☆☆
Carbon (Venue 180), run ended
Let us make no bones about it, I am, and have always been, a huge fan of Peter Buckley Hill. And tonight I have the absolute privilege of having him all to myself because the rest of you are too dim to realise what you are missing. Sonnets. That is what. Many sonnets, and all written by the man himself. Not the Shakespeare man (I was never as much of a fan of his). Peter's are sometimes dad-joke funny, sometimes truly poignant, often tremendously witty, and always impressive. There is darkness and there is pure silliness. There is anger, there is even death. And when he gets his poetical teeth into war, he will take your breath away. If you are lucky, he will share some of the works that have not yet made their appearance online. In case the sonnet form starts to do your head in, he will burst forth into a neuron-refreshing selection of his popular comic songs. And so...
There was an old man who wrote sonnets
No topic lacked one upon it
Way funnier than Will
And it's free, there's no bill
He's there every night if you wannit
KATE COPSTICK
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