Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Ed Night | Richard Duffy | Amy Annette

Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive) (Venue 313), until 25 August

★★★★

It’s been five years since his last Fringe show but Ed Night’s performance this month feels as if he’s been perfecting his craft on a daily basis.

Saturated with intelligent insight about mental and physical health, the hungry algorithm (or “algotross”) and revealing his own version of toxic masculinity, it’s a thrilling and original hour.

Night, shortlisted for best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for 2017’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, says there are 340 jokes in Plunge, but it feels like more. He toys with stand-up forms, tossing gags about, taking the mickey out of hack set-ups, dipping his toe in absurdity and making fun of the futility of some of the efforts we make to keep going. He’s sarcastic at times, but also somehow entirely honest. It’s really something to behold.

He is fully in charge of the room while at the same time revealing complex vulnerabilities in a way that’s as matter-of-fact as showing us a paper cut, and his mental health analogies are from the mind of a poet. You’ll never look at a Pixar film in the same way. 

Night has OCD and body dysmorphia and his GP thinks there’s some additional neurodivergence to address. And he’s bisexual with a cis girlfriend, for which he has the perfect simile. He expresses righteous anger about those who try to use OCD as an excuse for abhorrent behaviour, and refuses to accept people like him being thrown under the bus for their immorality.

His bits about his family are pretty special too. Observations about his parents growing up – as opposed to growing old – and a nugget about his grandfather are vivid and memorable.

Plunge is so dense with ideas, laughs and observations that you’ll want to go back again to absorb what you missed the first time around.

Ashley Davies

Richard Duffy is Asleep: A Retrospective

Just the Tonic Legends (Venue 27), until 25 August

★★★

You will not see much this month that is unique, but this show probably is. It is clever, inventive and an almost unacceptable amount of silliness wrapped in pyjama-coloured funny. I can tell you Richard does spend a LOT of the time on stage asleep. Yes he might dream and even sleeptalk, but mainly he sleeps while we laugh. And we laugh a lot. We laugh at what has been reconstructed of a seminal documentary on his career, covering the rapid escalation of his renowned 'Sleeping' shows, his fallings out with the comedy industry, his attempts to harness the power of ASMR and his adventures in philosophy and even the world of sleep athletics.

The five minutes we spend with the commentators on his world breaking sleep attempt are just about the most I have laughed this month. Richard – to prove how easy it is – even does stand-up comedy in his sleep, with the aid of Chat GPT. It is rumoured Peter Kay might just sue. It is the most ridiculously funny show. And this – despite his crowd work being friendly but a little uninspired and the show slightly outstaying its welcome - is exactly what the Fringe needs.

Kate Copstick

Amy Annette: Thick Skin

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), until 25 August

★★★

Amy Annette has been doing work on herself so other women don't have to. A product of the 1990s, her formative years were spent absorbing chick flicks, chick lit and girl's magazines with precociously explicit sex advice, anchoring her personality around the ideals of being thin and finding a boyfriend. Painstakingly unpicking that problematic legacy with wry clear-sightedness now, the cheerily amiable comic is thorough in her social critique.

Yet she still paints a vivid picture of a nerdy, singular young woman, channelling her anxieties into quirky interests, including a crush on David Suchet as Hercule Poirot, and with a distinctive persona that carried set responsibilities within her friend group. For all the distortions, it seems she's always had a relatively clear idea of herself, even if it's taken hindsight for her to fully appreciate the horror of Kate Moss sounding off or Trinny and Susannah's poisonous makeover shows.

Taking the latter apart with vengeful relish, Annette finds a careful balance between respecting her generation's mental health struggles and eliciting humour from them. Having previously worked with Aisling Bea as a producer, the pair share various intonations, emphases and a deft way of making comedy from dark and horrible things.

Jay Richardson

Graham Kay: Pete and Me

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Dram) (Venue 24), until 26 August

★★★

Graham Kay isn't the main character in his first Fringe show, a touching, funny hour that he really ought to have more faith in. A Canadian comic based in New York, his life, and that of the rest of his immediate family's, has been indelibly shaped by their relationship with his profoundly autistic younger brother. Stuck in the arrested development of a teenage boy, Pete is a loveable wildcard who can cause Kay and others tremendous difficulties in social situations, his inability to read cues and respond appropriately even leads to the comedian spending an extended period in jail.

Endearingly, the brothers converse on the phone more-or-less every day in the characters of Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie. But Kay reveals that sometimes it absolutely needs to be less, the mental toll of someone else being so dependent on you. He artfully finds the humour in his situation and certainly the humanity, suggesting that Pete has had a direct impact on him becoming a comic and contextualising his condition within the family's wider mental health struggles, reaching right back to World War II.

Kay has all the attributes of a snappy, North American anecdotal comic, stretching himself a little with this heartfelt, personal tale. Yet he needed more conviction on the night I saw it, failing to enthuse a quiet but attentive crowd, before bailing a little abruptly and early.

Jay Richardson

Josh Glanc: Family Man

Monkey Barrel (Venue 515), until 25 August

★★★

“Are you ready for the best night of your life?” roars crop-topped Aussie master of nonsense Josh Glanc as he trumpets his imminent arrival on stage, seemingly oblivious that it’s the middle of the afternoon. In Glanc’s world one suspects it’s always about 10.30pm in the evening and minutes away from a drunken party that nobody will ever forget.

Self-described as comedy for ‘silly billies’ and ‘cheeky monkeys’, this is an occasionally joyous mix of self-knowing buffoonery showcasing the likeable performer’s myriad skills. There are songs, daft characters and high wire audience participation that relies a little too much on how entertaining the front row will be (the answer today was ‘very’, but even then one segment went awry).

The comedy is far from subtle but the structure verges on the ingenious - a series of false starts creating a preposterous live comedy version of ‘Groundhog Day’, as the set repeatedly returns to the beginning only to play out differently each time. These multiverses are interchangeable, meaning each show will be slightly different.

While undoubtedly clever, this approach means that all too often momentum is squandered, frustratingly never letting the lunacy run unfettered.

David Hepburn