Our round-up of Edinburgh Fringe comedy, from Lorna Rose Treen to Paddy Young
We’re more than halfway through this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and with more than 3,000 shows taking place at this year’s festival, choosing what to watch isn’t getting any easier. But while the 20,000-step days and constant pints might be catching up with punters, performers are preparing for another 10 days of shows, all in the hope of becoming the Next Big Thing.
Below you’ll find reviews of four new comedy talents aiming to impress. Come back next week, where you’ll find more reviews from the worlds of comedy and theatre.
Greta Titelman’s Exquisite Lies – Pleasance Courtyard â â â ââ
Greta Titelman’s stand-up show is called Exquisite Lies, but the New York comedian’s breathtaking honesty is what’s most compelling. Titelman began lying as a child, she tells us, as a way of impressing her bullies. Yet as she walks us through her life from the age of 10 to her early twenties, it becomes clear that the star of HBO comedy Los Espookys has lived a dark and fascinating enough life to entertain us with the truth.
On stage in her debut Fringe hour, Titelman is a natural storyteller. She speaks (and sings) in a mix of the old Hollywood drawl and millennial baby voice, bringing a playful charm to the more absurd, messed up parts of her life.
She describes finding out about her dad’s affair by reading his PalmPilot (a tablet-like piece of Nineties tech she has to explain for the mostly Gen-Z audience), then wails that she never even wore the Hervé Léger dress she blackmailed him into buying her. We hear about the cool older girl at boarding school that Titelman was obsessed with, right up until she convinced her to take OxyContin in her dorm room. “I was really, really good at drugs at a young age,” she proudly explains.
Titelman is at her best in these laser-specific moments; when she slips into more obvious, well-worn material about dating or living in New York, the pace slows. Titelman has a strong singing voice, but the original songs peppered throughout the show never quite click. She has interesting stories to tell, and the speaking voice to do it, so it seems a shame to waste it.
Lorna Rose Treen: Skin Pigeon – Pleasance Courtyard â â â â â
The debut show from Lorna Rose Treen, reigning winner of the prestigious Funny Women comedy award, is densely packed with offbeat characters, bizarre costumes and ridiculous gags. It’s a wild experience, yet one of the funniest at this year’s Fringe. The result, usually, is part guffaw, part groan – but total pleasure.
Over an hour, Treen introduces us to a wide range of characters, each more bizarre than the last. There’s the croaky voiced nine-year-old Brownie Guide proudly showing off her badges (she can’t be a Sixer as she “can’t be in charge because of the things that I do”), a dolphin looking at itself in the mirror, and Sally Rooney introducing her new interactive children’s book about a pair of chain-smoking babies. An unashamed silliness links the material, a proud stupidity and unwillingness to take itself seriously, with lines such as: “I took the midnight train to nowhere, but the train was cancelled so I had to take the rail replacement bus to somewhere and walked.”
But while Skin Pigeon is packed to the rafters with jokes, it’s the design that elevates Treen’s show to something extraordinary. A mentee of the creators of oddball puppet Channel 4 show Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Treen brings those same childlike bizarre touches to her costumes and props, donning a grotesque, worm-like tail and flapping large pigeon wings in the show’s final moments.
Since winning the Funny Women award last year, Treen’s Edinburgh show has been highly anticipated. Debuts trailed by such feverish excitement don’t always live up to the hype – but Treen’s does, and then some.
Urooj Ashfaq: Oh No! – Assembly George Square â â âââ
In India, Urooj Ashfaq is considered to be an “edgy” comedian. In comparison to many comedians in Edinburgh, she admits to feeling “quite lame”, but the Mumbai-based comic does have bite, and an ability to disarm with a sweet smile, before she shocks us with a controversial joke. Although there’s strong material here, Ashfaq gets knocked off course by a quieter audience, and the rest of the show unravels. It’s difficult to see her struggle.
Things start off promisingly: material about her parents’ divorce isn’t nearly as culturally shocking in the UK as back home, Ashfaq tells us, but it allows her to swiftly establish tone and interact with the crowd. The darkest, funniest stuff comes in discussion of her own Muslim identity and mental health, and a gag about putting hypothetical scenarios to her therapist on behalf of her friends who can’t afford to go contains nuggets of gold.
Sure, the audience might not be the most responsive, and some of the observations about so many men having podcasts are a little obvious, but Ashfaq’s jokes get laughs. She, however, is unconvinced and complains about how bad the crowd is. This, too, elicits laughter. Yet rather than power forward, the comic gives up. She tells us the show is running fast as she rushes through her material. Then, she assures us in a half-hearted callback, she will be talking to her therapist about this.
When Ashfaq loses confidence in herself, the audience does too. Without the pacey delivery she had at the start, segments where she lists off one-liners from note cards and reads from her teenage diaries fail to land. Comedians are allowed to have bad days or tricky audiences, but watching them give up (particularly when they didn’t need to) is a tough watch.
Paddy Young: Hungry, Horny, Scared – Pleasance Courtyard â â â â â
From the second he introduces himself as a man “northern enough for you to know that this show is going to be depressing”, Paddy Young marks his territory as one of British comedy’s most intriguing new voices. Still, when the piano-underscored emotional climax of his show focuses on the tragic loss of his AirPods, you realise he’s never quite trying to be taken seriously.
Young’s show revolves around two key elements: his identity as a man from Scarborough – a town best known in recent years for a masturbating walrus (it’s true, google if you dare) – and his experiences of the cruel London rental market. For the former, he depicts his family as stereotypes from a motivational sports movie about the North, while also describing his childhood as a bed-wetter – or, as he puts it, “a little pissy pants boy”. In the latter, he describes the horrors of living in a houseshare with a passive-aggressive juggler, and using his 2012 Lenovo laptop for warmth to keep heating bills down.
There’s strong material throughout, but the best stuff comes in the weirder set pieces at the end of his hour which largely stray from those central themes. His discussion of the fact that Hitler was apparently addicted to cocaine and methamphetamine leads to an ingenious impression of the fascist on a comedown, before warning that we’re heading into the “sad bit of the show” as tragic piano chords swell. The sound and lighting cues are expertly deployed here – really, I wish they’d been used more throughout – Young lamenting of his lost Airpods: “Careless? Maybe. Wireless. Absolutely,” with an ever-raised eyebrow. It’s a suitably silly end to a confident, breezy debut.
