Edinburgh Fringe highlights: Euronews Culture’s five comedy picks

We’ve been at the Edinburgh Fringe trawling through the shows so you don’t have to. Here are Euronews Culture’s five highlights from the comedy on offer this year.

While the Edinburgh Fringe is a cultural festival that attracts all kinds of artists, the vast majority of punters come for the comedy.
After scouring through as much as possible of the comedy on offer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, we’ve compiled the best comedians to make it up to the Scottish capital.
One of the biggest hits of this year’s festival comes from a dank working men’s club in Rochdale that’s also a portal to hell. Well, that’s what 2023 BBC New Comedy Award winner Joe Kent-Walters would have you believe in his surreal character comedy show as club owner Frankie Monroe. With lashings of Sudocrem on his face that drips off as he sweats, getting in his bloodshot eyes as an act of pure masochism, Frankie Monroe is a genius creation. The sleazy character would be deeply unsettling – it all kicks off with Kent-Walters strangling himself in a “magic trick” that’s for his sick pleasure – but never tips the scale into creepy due to Kent-Walters precise mix of self-aware charm and the sheer assault of precisely intended incoherence – the next set-piece is a song about his special garden trowel. The comedy is found somewhere between the millennial random humour of ‘The Mighty Boosh’ and the more contemporary chaos of Sam Campbell. Kent-Walters plays with the audience as his affable – if deranged – club owner, getting them to play along with his questionable magic tricks, sing along to convoluted songs, and be the butt of good natured northern bullying. Kent-Walters’ commitment to the bit is what sells the show here, leading to a gratifyingly silly finale as Monroe finally succumbs to his Faustian pact.
Sophie Duker’s comedy star has been in ascendance for a while, and thanks to a wildly popular appearance on TV series ‘Taskmaster’, her fans have grown legion. When she bursts onto the stage for ‘But Daddy I Love Her’, she gleefully charges through the crowd to rapturous applause. It’s earned and exactly the validation she’s looking for as Duker runs through a set all about “delulu”, the Gen Z phrase that means “delusion, but in a camp way”. Duker always thought her vibe was of a cool girl, but as she’s getting older and learning about herself – via therapy sessions with her ridiculous Italian counsellor Michelangelo – she’s leaning into a new modern take on self-acceptance: you don’t have to face the music of reality if you just accept the delulu lifestyle. On the way, we learn about her strained relationship with her absent-ish father, her mother’s own delulu lifestyle collecting vials of holy water, and Duker owning her queer identity. Duker’s brilliance lies in her unshakably charming persona on-stage paired with whip-smart observational humour. A bit about mistaking Bessel van der Kolk’s trauma therapy research book’s title ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ as merely a quirky British idiom is one of the funniest comedy bits I’ve seen this year. Be warned, men in the front row will be mercilessly, if good-humouredly, picked on.
Mexican comedian Lara Ricote has made a big splash on the UK comedy scene in recent years with increasingly regular appearances on TV panel shows. Her Fringe show this year has been an unsurprising hit from the joyful comic who brings her whole self to the stage. From the off, she confronts the audience that, yes, this is just how her voice sounds. It’s a bracingly earnest set that deals with her relationship to Argentinian comedian Fer Rodil – who also brought his excellent show ‘Pampa’s Pride’ to Edinburgh for a single performance – and their trials and tribulations, from his moving to the Netherlands to be with her, going through couples therapy, and an in-your-face routine about dissociating during sex. Ricote has made it clear that this show is about her attempting to make real connections with both individuals in her life and audiences. This manifests as a bit where she has the audience select a name for itself ‘Countdown’ name generation style, leading to her affectionately referring to the crowd as “Jog Laru” throughout the entire set, a joke which never gets tired. From the impact of growing up with beads instead of doors to her deafness and Rodil’s lack of smell being the perfectly matching disabilities in a relationship, Ricote’s joyful approach to life’s hurdles makes this set essential.
At the very start of her set, New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo jokes that the Fringe standard hour is too long for a comedy set. Instead, everyone would far rather it was a cool 50 minutes, ensuring no one starts gazing at their watches around the 45-minute mark. She then launches into one of the most frenetic and relentless sets, making me wonder if Matafeo is the fastest talking comedian of this year’s Fringe for the sheer volume of material she fits into her one hour routine. As the title suggests, Matafeo likes going on and on, but largely it’s because she’s never comfortable with endings – whether it’s for her comedy routines or her relationships. Her trademark uncertain delivery between jokes belies the careful orchestration as she zips through non-sequiturs about her tome-worthy iPhone notes app word count full of forlorn lovesick poetry and cucumber puns to insights about self-care and growth. The whole set is in service for Matafeo to assert her dominance over previous break-ups. So much so that she dresses the audience down hilariously when they fall for her suggestion that the whole thing has a happy ending as she’s now engaged. When the set’s actual ending comes, it comes with a surprisingly neat tying together that shows glints of her screenwriting work on the excellent BBC show ‘Starstruck’.
One of the Fringe’s most enjoyable qualities is the chance to encounter something brilliant on a whim. This Free Fringe show was a surprise highlight from Katharyn Henson, a New York-based writer who spends the hour regaling tales from her time working as a manager in a BDSM dungeon. The entire thing is a casual affair with Henson taking questions from the audiences about the strangest kinks she’s encountered, how everyone should rush at the opportunity to be findomed (look it up), and a Hasidic Jew’s innermost desires. Scheduled for 2.30pm, don’t be mistaken by the timing, this is very much an 18+ show.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival takes place until 26 August.