Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Olga Koch | Micky Overman | Will Robbins | Luke Rollason | Anirban Dasgupta

Olga Koch Comes From Money ★★★★

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 3) (Venue 515) until 25 August

Privilege has become one of the last great taboos in stand-up. But Olga Koch isn't constrained by many of the social mores that inhibit British-born comedians, being as open about the ridiculous wealth she grew up with, framed with more than a hint of pantomime villainy, as she is about her sexuality. Delighting in transgressions of the norm and bourgeoisie, she's impressed by the young lads she encounters on a train in London, flaunting their aspirant lusts. Based in the English capital, educated in New York and the daughter of the former deputy prime minister of Russia, Koch's father facilitated the carve up of the Soviet Union's utilities during the 1990s, creating some obscenely rich oligarchs and patently getting his cut, though details remain murky. Maintaining he did nothing untoward, it's surely just coincidence that so many of his peers and associates who have displeased Vladimir Putin have since experienced unfortunate accidents.

Straddling cultures, Koch is perceptive about the underlying framework of the American Dream and its Russian and British equivalents, though our class system and its “posh” strata are a whole other unique invention, her outsider's eye bringing clarity and sharp humour to picking apart the rotten edifice. Toxic, eccentric billionaires such as Peter Thiel and “blood boy” draining Bryan Johnson are held up for ridicule. But this limited socio-economic analysis serves chiefly to contextualise Koch's direct experience of being moneyed, the excess that she's been party to a sizeable trust fund worth of gags. Any time she appears poised to give herself credit for her own successes, she undercuts herself. And by painstakingly striving to answer all the direct, impolite questions people hope to know of someone in her luxurious position, she's brazenly funny while retaining control of her narrative. She might have had a significant leg up in life and continues to reap the benefits. But Koch has a daring, upfront and incisive wit that money simply can't buy.

Micky Overman: Hold On ★★★★

Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Tron) (The Tron) (Venue 51) until 25 August

Delivering a relatable but accomplished coming-of-age tale, Micky Overman doesn't redefine this kind of deeply personal show but does hit all the right beats for a satisfying, entertaining hour. The Dutch stand-up is at a point in her life where family and society are making strong suggestions that she and her long-term boyfriend ought to get married. Yet Overman is resisting, putting up a strong case for the anachronism of marriage in the modern age. Painting a compelling portrait of their slightly dysfunctional but mutually supportive life together, Overman initially appears relatively confident in her relationship status, even as she boldly shares her insecurities about the main ways her partner is coming up short. Yet gradually, she allows a more complex picture to emerge, of a pattern of behaviour that's dogged her all her life and which threatens her happiness, even as she embarks upon the process of trying for a baby.

The fact that you really care about the couple's relationship is testimony to Overman's storytelling elan. Because with typical goofiness, she's couched the saga in blowsily opinionated routines in which she undermines her own authority. The slight of her (male) celebrity lookalike becomes a running thread in the narrative, the details of one notorious incident of his' dissected at a level of demonstrably disturbed mental health by the stand-up. Overman also capably captures the weirdness of announcing that you're trying for a child, the bizarreness of scheduled sex and the general messiness involved. Highly expressive, and with an ever-present sense of her own ridiculousness, she brings a light touch to what belatedly coalesces into rather difficult circumstances, belying her earlier breezy dismissiveness. Hold On feels like a watershed show for a maturing and flourishing performer.

Will Robbins: With the Best Will in the World ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Attic) (Venue 33) until 25 August

Will Robbins takes a relaxed approach to his Fringe debut, easing into the vivid introduction of his life growing up in isolated Somerset, with his slightly rough diamond father and a mother who can only find the best in the worst of people. The area around Glastonbury he evokes is one of pseudy spirituality but rich in local characters and he gently teases his upbringing. As a little person, you get a strong sense of how his disability helped make him the class clown but his introductory gag and an odd early reference aside, he only really digs into it with his accounts of being approached by an events company and a film shoot. Asked to straddle a line between being exploited and claiming an easy meal ticket, he gets to mock the more regressive aspects of these enterprises, convey his unease but suggest his mercenary tendencies will always win out. Unfortunately, a section in which he recalls driving DJs and musicians around America as a sort of Bez-style mascot, isn't as deeply mined. And you get the feeling that not only is Robbins refraining from naming names but also withholding some details. Still, he closes with a thoughtful but blithely funny distinction of when he will lean into or pull back from acknowledging his disability, an endearing, self-knowing end to a decent festival bow.

Luke Rollason Let Down Your Hair ★★★

Pleasance Dome (10 Dome) (Venue 23) until 25 August

At the more frivolous vanguard of the modern clowning trend that has swept the Fringe in recent years, Luke Rollason has parlayed his sprightly imagination and limber physicality, reminiscent of a young Rowan Atkinson, into this winning retooling of classic fairytales. Opening with a brilliantly daft evocation of King Midas that effectively sets the parameters of call-and-response audience interaction the show relies upon, Rollason's myths take pages out of the Grimm and Disney playbook, as well as that of Michael Rosen's oeuvre. But they lean towards the darkness of the former, incorporating mentions of cuckolded giants and The Human Centipede, while Rapunzel's suitors tend to end up expiring in a splodgy mess. Making a virtue of his rudimentary props, with some particularly varied use of toilet roll, Rollason capers and gambols through his routines, a puckish character leading the audience on merry dances. If there's an issue, it's that a latent father-son relationship thread never quite draws together, whether that be in slightly stilted roleplay or the belated introduction of Rollason's real-life progenitor into proceedings. Suggesting inherited mental health issues, it never comes close to developing into something tangible enough to provide an extra dimension to the silliness, of what's otherwise another undemanding, easily enjoyable hour from the gifted comic.

Anirban Dasgupta: Polite Provocation ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker One) (Venue 33) until 25 August

Literally looking over his shoulder, albeit merely at latecomers as it transpires, Anirban Dasgupta plies his trade as a stand-up in an India where the censorship of material about politics and religions is very real and with marked consequences. Yet a chance encounter with the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, sort of, inspires him to cut loose a little and to find “loopholes” in what he feels permitted to talk about. Affable, he delicately assesses the father of his nation's now rather compromised reputation and gently has a bit of fun observing a festival dedicated to the Hindu god Ganesh. There's no malice or disrespect in either section but Dasgupta conveys the strictures he's usually working under, the constriction of free speech and the insistence upon “factual comedy”, whatever that might mean. After becoming a father, his love for his daughter still finds him muttering about certain aspects of parenthood. And it prompts the bizarre – to my Western ears – account of his own birth to ageing parents, whereby his multi-generational family living under one roof operated a strict one-out, one-in policy, meaning he or rival cousins couldn't be born until an older member of the dynasty died but then a conception race began. Related with a winning wryness, it's the hallmark of an accomplished anecdotal act.