We’ve reached the halfway point at the Edinburgh fringe, where more than a third of the 3,600 shows are comedy. Rain is pouring and I’m clambering up one of the city’s many hills to get to the next show: my 50th of the festival. This is my second year serving on the panel for the Edinburgh comedy awards, whose best show prize is the most coveted of the festival, previously bagged by everyone from Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and co’s 1981 Cambridge Footlights to, in later years, Al Murray, Bridget Christie and Rose Matafeo. It means I get the golden ticket into the dingy rooms where unknowns become the stars of tomorrow before our eyes.
A comedian’s first hour is their chance to introduce themselves, with all their quirks and personality, to the world. And no one has done that with more flare than Abby Wambaugh, in her enchanting The First Three Minutes of 17 Shows (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★). It’s just that: the beginning of 17 different shows, each presenting a different chapter of Wambaugh’s life, including a move to the Netherlands, pregnancy and miscarriage; it bursts with creativity and unexpectedness.
Similarly, Jin Hao Li, who describes himself as “made in China and marinated in Singapore”, serves up a surreal hour in Swimming in a Submarine (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★). Using smart wordplay, he honours the siblings he could have had if his father’s sperm had swum a little faster. He has the tone of a schoolboy, grinning from ear to ear, but talks of army conscription and romances in university canteens. Meshing his dreams with reality, the whole thing feels like a dizzying trip to the deep underwater unknown.
Others use the stage to process trauma. Channelling Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, Anna Akana’s debut, It Gets Darker (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★), weaves her sister’s suicide with her own encounters with a stalker – she jokily names him Daddy Reindeer. Dee Allum’s Deadname (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★), about her coming out as a trans woman, plays as a farewell to her past identity and a celebration of her new self.
But the hottest newcomer ticket is Joe Kent-Walters. He storms on to the stage with Joe Kent-Walters Is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! (Monkey Barrel, ★★★★★), at the late start time of 11.25pm. Any tiredness I have evaporates with his entrance. In he plods, dripping with Sudocrem, used as white facepaint, as Frankie Monroe, old-school MC of a Rotherham working men’s club. “You might be thinking, what is this?” he barks. The next hour is one of bizarre, grotesque, unceasing laughs right up there with the League of Gentleman and Johnny Vegas. We get possessed puppeteering, foul rubber gloves, and a welcome visit from Monroe’s rotten-toothed nephew, Brandy. A nightmarish, horrific vision it might be, but Monroe’s growls will stay with me long past his final dealings with the devil.
In the storm of the festival, I start to play fringe bingo: Hitler jokes are not uncommon. Some performers, like the brilliant Sarah Keyworth in My Eyes Are Up Here (Monkey Barrel, ★★★★), use their relationship with their parents as their source material. And this year, autism has been the centre point for many. In Must We (Monkey Barrel, ★★★), Pierre Novellie shows how his own spectrum disorder affects his everyday life: he orders large quantities of rye bread off the internet, struggles to decide what to wear in the morning, uses food as a reward. In Autism Mama (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★), Josephine Lacey talks candidly about parenting her 17-year-old autistic son. It’s as much an education as it is a hilarious tale of how she taught him to masturbate.
Larry Dean has been told all his life that he might have autism, but only recently, accompanied by his mother, went to get a test. The confirmed result led to a fresh understanding of his past and personality, which provides the impetus for Dodger (Monkey Barrel, ★★★★). Written as a love letter to his late grandmother, who died last year aged 98, it’s a tender, touching hour that sees Dean paying her back for her years of support by going along with her dementia-induced theories. He performs like a hurricane, barely stopping to take breath, with a joke neatly packaged into each sentence.
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Like Dean, many comedians opt to use their stage time as a chance to analyse themselves. In Dan Tiernan’s doubly funny show Stomp (Monkey Barrel, ★★★★), he’s his own punchbag. He’s got gout, eight years’-worth of marijuana addiction and dyspraxia. “I look like I’m really bad at maths, or really good at it,” he says, straight-faced. But an Edinburgh audience laps up self-deprecation.
There’s lots of it in Colin Hoult’s Colin (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★) too. In his first fringe show divorced from his alter ego – actor, singer and welder Anna Mann – Hoult stands alone, unshielded. But fans of Mann needn’t worry, because Hoult has an organic theatricality running through his veins. Journeying back through his childhood in Mapperley, while simultaneously analysing his life now with his children, the show gently ponders what it actually means to be normal and to belong. “He’s not right,” Hoult’s dad once said of him; but Colin’s celebration of difference is what makes this show a beauty.
Traces of Hoult can be picked out in John Tothill’s Thank God This Lasts Forever (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★★), in which the blithe pleasure-seeker chronicles his time on a malaria trial gone wrong and encourages us to drink ourselves into oblivion and simply enjoy ourselves. The show could go on all night, Tothill suggests – and what a joyous evening it would be.
In a haze of laughter and exhaustion, I start to question what makes a good comedy hour. Can it be merely one side-splitting burst of laughter, as I found in Lou Wall’s show The Bisexual’s Lament (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★)? It made public an almost unbelievable dialogue Wall had about selling a bed on Facebook Marketplace, but was otherwise too reliant on recycled videos from the internet. Perhaps it’s watching a panel show favourite such as Sophie Duker perform live in all her glory But Daddy I Love Her (Pleasance Courtyard, ★★★), even if we don’t quite see the sparkle of her previous two fringe appearances.
Or is it a sense of jeopardy, which I certainly found in Olga Koch’s courageous Olga Koch Comes from Money (Monkey Barrel, ★★★★), in which she discusses her upbringing as part of the privileged Russian elite. Here, Koch is finer than she’s ever been, her opportunities and success constantly picked at and unravelled. The result is a show that is knotty but uniquely exposing.
Bravery doesn’t always pay off, however. Alfie Brown’s Open Hearted Human Enquiry (Just the Tonic at the Caves, ★★), which looks back on the year that followed videos of him using the N-word during a comedy set in 2015 resurfacing, feels like an exercise in self-indulgence. Attempting and failing to walk the line between making an apology and presenting a case for his right to reply, it’s a convoluted examination of language and power. Brown is clearly a big thinker, and his argument is a spiky one. But this feels unfinished and misguided.
The fringe is a minefield of talent, and the joy is landing on an unexpected gem. This year I’ve seen shows that have made me feel, think and laugh enormously – perhaps more than I’ve ever seen before at this stage of the festival. But the wonder of the fringe is also a frustration. Night after night, a future giant might be performing, unknown to the world – myself included.