Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Jain Edwards: She-Devil | Helen Bauer: Bless Her | Kit Loyd: Frenzy + more

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 25 August

With some exceptionally winsome surrealism, Jain Edwards' dementedly good show is delivered with matter-of-fact, singsong positivity.

The Manchester-based Welsh comic can make an exorcism sound like the most divine of blessings and the most dubious romance like a meeting of soulmates. Finding her people in the unlikely pastime of zorbing, she admires the fraternal bond of the Gunpowder Plotters and cheerily dismisses betrayals with the casual indifference of one certain that fate has set her upon a benign path.

She bends over backwards and prostrates herself to make her relationship work, or at least to make her partner happy. But that she seeks to collaborate with Aileen Wuornos, America's most prolific female serial killer, and to surpass Ruth Ellis, her hometown icon from Rhyl, the last woman hanged in the UK, affords one slight pause for thought.

Still, you're blindsided by her mastery of silly setups, disguising unexpected punchlines, Edwards' naïvely innocent persona clearly housing a lively, if somewhat touched and atypical mind.

Her autism doesn't account for everything though. And she ultimately opens a can of worms as effectively as the Russian Dolls visual metaphor that she employs.

Revisiting my notes for She-Devil, it's fascinating how openly she's hidden the show's underlying cause in plain sight, with the containment of her feelings at once a triumph of artistic composure and patently part of the reason for her pain.

Hopefully, performing this singular hour and the plaudits she'll likely receive for it will go some way to assuage the abuse that she's endured. Because she's got a style and perspective all of her own.

That it takes such measures and artifice to once again highlight an endemic failing of the comedy industry is a sad indictment of so little having changed over the last decade or so.

Jay Richardson

Helen Bauer: Bless Her ★★★★

Monkey Barrel 1 (Venue 515) until 24 August

Helen Bauer has always seemed bulletproof - someone uncompromisingly loud, funny and irritated by petite women. But Bless Her is a revelation: a candid insight into the heart of a person who has clearly been working on what’s getting in the way of her desires and needs.

Now 34, she wants children but has never had a romantic partner. And, like most women contemplating parenthood, she’s been examining the way patterns within women’s relationships with their daughters often repeat themselves down the generations.

She doesn’t go into detail about her own mother, but she’s at the stage of therapy which involves her having spent every day of the past year with her inner child, joking about the fact that she and the eight-year-old don’t especially like each other.

She’s characteristically rambunctious and playful around the subject, but underneath it all is significant disclosure about her youthful feelings of inadequacy (related in part to dyslexia), her resultant relationship with food and the shame that accompanies that.

It feeds into observations on the ways in which being the “big” one in a friendship group can shape one’s personality, or at least the way one is perceived. If this all sounds too serious to be funny, think again: Bauer is a master comedian whose priority is making us laugh. Sure, she’s working on finding her compassionate voice, but, come on, she says, she’s not American.

Bauer deserves further plaudits for starting this show just a few days after having had surgery to remove the agonising gall stones that had been causing her digestive system to shut down. She makes light of the fact that she’s “evolved” a gastric sleeve, but it’s a big and rare deal to be so candid about the cause and effect of, not to mention recovery from, a binge eating disorder.

In opening up and revealing her vulnerability, Bauer has not only created an important show, but has created the right conditions for her funniest hour yet.

Ashley Davies

Candace Bryan: MILF (Mom I'd Like to Find) ★★★

Just the Tonic Nucleus (Venue 393) until 24 August

A talented joke writer with a polished mastery of simile, American émigré Candace Bryan also has a mother-shaped hole in her life.

For many years, the Memphis-born stand-up and her single father were ok, if financially and emotionally impoverished. But the comic isn't so naïve not to think she may have stored up some issues from her mother abandoning her when she was a baby, not least with an Edinburgh debut to write. Hastening this psychological reckoning, her mom recently slid into her social media DMs after three decades of silence.

With her sexually footloose, drugs appreciating progressiveness and rhythmically punchy delivery confounding her Bible Belt origins, London-based Bryan really takes her time opening up about her mother reaching out, sharing instead the details of her impressively international dating résumé and the dysfunctional relationships she's been in.

Clearly, it's all connected to her original trauma. Still, you suspect that at least on some level, the ADHD bisexual is embracing situations for the fallout and subsequent story, with self-mocking hindsight to the fore.

Eventually circling back to her errant parent, the open-ended nature of Bryan's conclusion isn't the least satisfying aspect of it. That's part of her broader tendency to deflect just when you're crying our for her to claw at the jugular of her feelings.

Jay Richardson

Simon Evans: Staring At The Sun ★★★

Just The Tonic Caves (Venue 88) until 24 August

It is something of a thrill to spend an hour surfing the waves of words that come out of Simon Evans. Few other comics can take you from Coleridge and Olivia Newton John via pus and dysentery to Enoch Powell, Platonic philosophy and blow-jobs. Especially not standing in front of a huge Raphael painting (yes, there is comedy in Raphael, who knew?).

He is, increasingly, a masterful presence onstage and an elegant wordsmith – some Gervais material is described as “very disobliging”. I love that he knows his audience can cope with the Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Entanglement and what he calls 'proper artisan pornography', as he reads an extract from Limousine Lust - some of his own, early, work.

At some length. The Online Safety Bill troubles Simon, as does the way AI is about to cut us off at the head. He is fearless politically, in a way only those seen to be 'a bit right wing' have to be. He has, he says, decided to eschew safe Boomer comedy to be the 'voice of the disenfranchised'. And no, he probably doesn't mean who you think he means.

Many comics send you off with jokes in your head. I go straight online to find out more about Julius Evola.

Kate Copstick

Auditory Awakenings with Mr Tingles in the House of ASMR ★★★

Bannermans (Venue 357) until 10 August

There are many strange shows on the Fringe this August. Very few, I suspect, will be stranger than this.

Yogi Belle is (allegedly) the world's number one live ASMR practitioner and sound beautician. Whatever that is. There is quite a lot of Tibetan prayer bowl action to start with, and a whispered introduction, 50% of which is inaudible, before we all find ourselves making pigeon and seagull noises. Rather well, I think.

But, after a check to make sure there is no AI in the room, we quickly move on to being audibly surprised (some surprises small, some large) and listening in to Yogi's 'thinking voice'. All of Yogi's voices are soft and fairly highly pitched.

As a distraction from his worries, we are all treated to some therapy involving a balloon on a stick. We are all as bemused as each other, but going with Yogi's flow.

Mr Tingles makes his first appearance, and with him leading the way we discover our inner porpoise, hear some truly appalling whale jokes and are amazed by the Sonorous Recalibration of a speccy bloke from the front row. Finally, we all enthusiastically echo-locate in whale to unlock the door in Bannermans. Mind. Blown.

Kate Copstick

Kit Loyd: Frenzy ★★★

Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 24 August

Kit Loyd is a pumped-up and lithe physical performer, injecting adrenaline-fuelled intensity into his sketches.

A Gaulier-trained clown with a football casual's up-for-it vibe, his one-man show is a headrush riot of light and sound, the comic splaying his limbs and gurning monstrously through alternate slow-motion and speeded up rave scenes and other quirky scenarios.

Exhorting the audience to name their favourite “blue thing”, his seemingly disparate sketches initially wrongfoot with their randomness. But when he declares his issues, and his ache for the nocturnal escapades of his youth, the underlying logic becomes apparent.

Speaking only sporadically, justifiably confident in his mime skills' capacity to convey his meaning, I must confess, however, he lost me a bit as he capered through a routine on a plane, with passengers clambering over each other. Yet whether presenting a lonely janitor graphically finding love with his mop or just dancing on the impact of a hail of machine-gun bullets, he's a mesmeric focal point for the spotlight.

And the sheer coursing energy and impish humour of Frenzy makes it an easy recommend if you fancy enlivening your evening.

Jay Richardson

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