48 Below
Aug 3-27 (19.30)

Material:  Delivery:  Laughs:

Samantha Pressdee is a cherub-cheeked enigma. A sweet lass from the Black Country who finds herself in Edinburgh via a mad stint in London as a feminist & anarchist of some repute. Passionately anti-establishment & honest to her core, she has decided to channel her political identity through the medium of stand-up comedy. Political comedy is usually satirical, concentrating on the sexual misdemeanors of our MPs & the suchlike, but Samantha’s muse is that of benefits Britain, not in the sickeningly voyeuristic reality shows that disgrace our TV screens from time to time, but that of the London squatter scene & her place in that vibrant theatre of life. In a recent interview with The Mumble, Sam elaborated upon her status as an anarcha-feminist comic;

I think confrontation can create comedy, or just enemies. Confrontation with bare breasts is very funny, but also very serious. We are serious comedians. I was actually a comedian before I became an anarcha-feminist, before I was just ‘a feminist’ but I had to separate myself from the ones who hate men and sex positive women. Anarchy is about challenging hierarchy, feminism is about challenging patriarchy. So it makes sense that feminism shouldn’t turn into a matriarchy. We need equal ground!

Samantha sets off as a comedian, full of child-like innocence in her deadpan delivery, but it is not long before we enter her main theme & the comedy is replaced by a self-therapeutic dissertation on her life as an activist. She brings us battles with bailiffs, encounters with Russell Brand & heroin addiction among other set-pieces, her words occasionally backed up by video clips on a big telly. There is also high emotion from the lass as she reaches the end of her show, & on the occasion I saw she could hardly hold back the tears. Her creation is a curious hybrid, where nostalgic reminiscences are laced with intermittent gags & savage attacks upon the patriarchy. Quite the roulette wheel, her material sometimes lands on a funny number, & sometimes not, & as the show progresses the funny numbers came up less & less. But Back to Basics is no ordinary Fringe Show, & for that I applaud her. It is definitely an experience to spend an hour with Samantha, one that transcends the often silly banality of the mainstream Fringe.

Reviewer : Damo

Dragonfly, West Port
Aug 12-14, 16-27 (19.20)

Material:   Delivery:   Laughs:

If you like the feeling of tripping off your t**s but are too tight-fisted to actually buy any drugs then this is the show for you. Paul Vickers (a.k.a. Mr Twonkey) gives us a bizarre, meandering, Wonderland-esque blend of pure madness which will make you feel like you just dropped a shedload of topnotch ‘shrooms and washed them down with a pint of moonshine. His show consists of a (very, very, VERY loose) narrative about the quest of Mr Twonkey, who is looking for the Chicken Church deep in the heart of the jungle. Yes, you heard me. To visualise Mr T think of The Little Prince all grown up and living under a bridge in The Magic Roundabout…and I get the strong feeling Paul Vickers genuinely believes himself to be Mr Twonkey. This year sees the tenth Twonkey show, & we are presented with a new character. In a recent interview with The Mumble, he is introduced as;

Mr. Pines is a new character that I play, he’s my manager but he wants to kill me. I wear a fake nose and sunglasses and people boo me, he’s like a pantomime villain. He’s the one that’s sent me to the Jungle, he’s hoping I get lost and never come back. He has other acts that are more commercially viable so he wants me off the books and out of his hair for good.

The ‘story’ is interspersed with voiceovers, barmy tunes, some well orchestrated interaction with the audience (unlike some comedians, nothing too personal or vicious- he keeps it feelgood throughout) and a collection of puppets which appear to have been made by a gang of disturbed 5 year olds. The entire premise should mimic Twonkey’s props and fall apart after 5 minutes yet somehow this show bumbles along nicely and exudes a strange charm and humanity, consistently eliciting baffled laughter throughout and feelings of warmth and pity for Mr T…there is something just so disshevelled and likeable about him, he looks like someone who once had a career as a professional hobo but has managed to climb maybe halfway up one rung on the social ladder…you just desperately want him to do well, find his Chicken Church and complete his mission (whatever the hell that may be- we are still wondering).

For what it is Le Twonk’s show is a tad too long, and I suspect that, as is often the case, there may be a direct correlation between the mood of the audience and the calibre of the show but it’s not a fatal flaw, merely one that after 30 minutes has you briefly wondering what to see next and what to have for tea tomorrow but you can easily forgive this- as I said you are rooting for him the whole way through so this brief lull is a small price to pay for an otherwise engaging, unusual and bizarre 45 minutes.

The show starts off with a different character who narrates but it would also would benefit greatly from a radical change in direction halfway through, say 3 acts, with the middle act being completely different and perhaps involving some audience members being dragged up and lightly humiliated for the benefit of everyone else but overall it is a decent testament to the spirit of random weirdness and creativity that is characteristic of the Fringe Festival and makes for a refreshing antidote to the ever increasing number of super-produced commercial comedians out there.

Reviewer : Maya Moreno

After a successful first night last Friday, The Mumble will be bringing SEVEN more acts from the Edinburgh Fringe to perform for the good folk of East Lothian. There will be a licensed bar & people may come & go as they please through the night & it is free to get in, but as in the spirit of the Free Fringe in Edinburgh, bucket will be set up near the door to receive donations towards paying the costs of the evening. Doors will open at 19.30, & close at 23.30. Inbetween, the running order is as follows.

---

19:45 : ODETTE

Clown inspired character comedy, ‘Odette!’ tells the story of a ballsy, brash, heavily pregnant Aussie cleaning lady with big dreams of romance and stardom on cheesy American daytime TV soap ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’. It’s playful and fun, moving in parts, and unashamedly OTT. Oh, and there are a few songs thrown in for good measure!

You can read an interview with Odette here

 

---

20:20 : Joe Jacobs

Religion. Rap. Pogs. Sexism. Gaviscon. Mental illness. Success. Decline. Commitment and coffee coasters. Join Joe as he tries to make sense of all this and more prior to his best before date. As seen and heard on Channel 4, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 6 Music and BBC Radio 1Xtra. ‘

 

---

 

20:40: Susie Steed

Follow in the footsteps of power on this walking tour of capitalism from British Empire to banking crisis, with jokes. As Britain leaves the EU and Scotland tries to leave Britain, explore the shared history we’d rather forget. Led by ‘one to watch’ (FunnyWomen.com)

 

---

21:00 : Chris Cook

This is the first year Chris is bringing two brand new shows to the festival. The first is more of theatrical experience based around Control. Hre’s returning to a theme he explored two years ago with a show that was really challenging for me. He’s excited to be performing another show that is as much about the audience as the performer. It’s less about giving them a show and more about creating a community of people who go on a journey together. The audience get to determine the direction that journey takes. The second show is called Concealed and is a more intimate show. The magic happens right in front of the audiences faces and he gets to tell them a bit more about my life as a juggler, street performer and magician.

You can read an interview with Chris here.

---

21:40 : Lew Fitz

‘Engaging comic… smart and freshly funny’ (Scotsman). Cheeky northerner Lew Fitz is crashing the party…

 

 

---

22:00 : Matt Duwell 

Matt describes his Fringe how as being, ‘a stand up comedy show about how pessimism can sometimes actually help us to be happy and optimism and memes about unbound potential are not necessarily a good thing. It’s also a show that has some crowd interaction and of course a lot of jokes that are quite glib about the world we live in. I’m very proud of the jokes and in many ways, it’s the result of my entire comedy career so far. ‘

You can read an interview with Matt here…

---

22:20 : The Delightful Sausage

This weeks headliners are a brilliant duo from the North of England, whose Cold Hard Cache show is currently taking the Fringe by storm.

You can read an interview with Delightful Sausage here…

 

SEE YOU

NEXT FRIDAY!!!

Laughing Horse @ 48 Below
Aug 3-27 (12.00)

Material:   Delivery:   Laughs:  

Siân Docksey’s Totally Casual & Freewheeling Mystic Comedy Lemon Torpedo is an intelligent and meaningful way to spend your noon hour at this year’s Fringe. Our artist presents a smart metaphor for the difficulty of being an “ab”normal person in western society. The material deals with gender fluidity, sexism, sexuality and privilege. Her show started a tad slow, and at first I could not tell if Siân was actually doing a satire of comedians who try too hard to be funny OR was just plain trying too hard to be funny. But Siân was soon on her comedic feet, finding her groove, which peaked in a soliloquy on her grandmother’s immigration. It seemed to me as if Siân had stolen away from trying to be funny and started speaking directly from her creative spirit.

During her set Siân managed to make fun of both my sun-sign and my nationality. These gentle insults actually felt like a rock hitting the bottom of my stomach, and for a moment I stopped smiling or having fun. An unexpected & momentary awkardness which made me realise such emotions were mere trivialities in life, & I should just laugh off the digs & hold on tight to Siân’s torpedo as it hurtled through the comedy ocean. So I did, & I enjoyed it, & as I stepped out into the Broughton Street sunshine I thought to myself, ‘I aint ever seen anything quite like that!’  I highly recommend going to see Siân Docksey this Fringe. The show is fresh, thought-provoking and I can’t imagine there is anything better happening at noon.

Reviewer : Michael Beeson

 

The Cuckoo’s Nest
Aug 9-13/15-19/21-27 (13.50)

Material:  Delivery:   Laughs:  

Vicki from Dartford has slipped into a mild depression & fallen into a sofa-coma munching on digestive biscuits, flicking through the channels & barking at the telly. Modern existence in its most opiate form, but this young lady wants to rouse herself from her life-funk & do something, something cool. So we set off along her biopic, through dodgy jobs, dodgier romances, all suffered in pursuit of her chosen artform, to perform. From throwing up jagerbombs in a Dartford gutter, through supermarket counter politics, past her bumbling attempts to find love, to doing her glittering solo show for a full fringe, following Vicki’s journey is a frolicking odyssey of fun. In a recent interview with The Mumble, Vicki told us;

One Woman Army is a storytelling comedy show. I tell and act out stories from my life and play all the characters within them. A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with severe anxiety and this show started as me thinking about all the things that stress me out so I talk about awful retail jobs I’ve had, bad dating experiences, feeling out of depth in the acting world and the joys of living in Dartford. It’s basically me having a very relatable, witty moan about things. I perform the whole show in my dressing gown and it centres around me watching telly on my sofa and eating snacks.

She buzzes between scenes & characters with flawless accents & auras & faces, & she shows her scars to the audience, & she’s a wee hip-hop ninja, & she’s just, well, she’s just cool. A one woman sitcom, with a love of life in all its forms, I loved her, ‘these days its all about playing the field.. playing the game, but in the end we all end up playing with oursleves,’ a drop of wisdom making sense of the world we live in, as Ms Sargent is also trying to do, but she’s turned it into comedy gold!

Reviewer : Damo

The Underbelly
Aug 8-14, 16-27(15.40)

Material:  Delivery:   Laughs:  

Among the inner ribs of the Royal Mile, the Underbelly has created a black, stylish room which is one of the smartest performance spaces @ the Fringe. Sitting under its sexy black curves I immediately thought of Catwoman, & so I’d like to rename the room in which ‘TVs’ Dave Bibby strut his stuff the ‘Catwoman Cave.’ Moving onto the comedian himself, Mr Bibby is a jovial in the Georgian style, full of witty songs, silly costumes & fun games. His show is what he describes as ‘comedy tapas,’ a bit of everything for everyone, & his highly appreciative audience loved it. In a recent interview with The Mumble, Dave described the personal life-experiences which enters his comedy as being;

Anything that pisses me off. I have a song about the British Press in my current show. The printed media is dying and they’re not being very dignified about it. There’s a lot in my current show about LAD Culture – it’s not so much the lads I have a problem with more the way me, or anyone else in this industry who is from a working class background, is given that label. “How can he possibly play a King in Shakespeare when he spends his weekends drinking lager and watching football?”. By acting, go fuck yourself.

 

https://youtu.be/_KKHonRfVNQ

His routine is a dragonfly mix of stories, songs & fun times, & for me there were three stand out moments. The first is his playing of the British ‘lad’ to perfection, & in the process has invented a banter game in which people have to ‘hit the tit’ (a metal bell thing) when they guess the right answer… i.e. when Santa Claus becomes Banter Claus. One of the simplest & best comedy games I’ve ever seen at the Fringe, & I was cheering my head off every time someone got one right – both sides!  The other two highlights were an onscreen expose on the trolling he’d received after being on telly – self-deprecating brilliance – & his finale song about the tabloid press, a medley of eye-opening & satirical wonder. Dave Bibby is a one-man pantomime with an unpretentious desire to entertain first us, then himself. A guaranteed hour of mirthful hijinks!

Reviewer : Damo

Laughing Horse @ Moriarty’s
Aug 3-27 (17.00)

Material:  Delivery:  Laughs:  

Matt Duwell – pronounced duel – is a lithe gentleman in his 30s with something like a Persian beard quite unlike the one on his poster. What does remain from his poster, however, is the glass of beer, which I actually bought the fellow before he took to the stage,which he kept clutched in his left hand throughout his set in the fashion of an old-styles comedian. Indeed, Matt is a fine example of what is becoming a rare bread at the Fringe, a classic comedian who tells jokes without any gimicks. There is a central theme, of course, which Matt elaborated upon in a recent interview with The Mumble;

 

It’s a stand up comedy show about how pessimism can sometimes actually help us to be happy and optimism and memes about unbound potential are not necessarily a good thing. It’s also a show that has some crowd interaction and of course a lot of jokes that are quite glib about the world we live in. I’m very proud of the jokes and in many ways, it’s the result of my entire comedy career so far.

Matt’s chief strength is the ability to work an audience; rapid-fire-patter & quick thinking enables him to help us to laugh at ourselves as well as him. There was one stony faced turnip who refused to laugh, & Matt noticed this & just like we tickle our toddlers he was determined to make said turnip laugh – it took a while, but the microsecond the turnip smiled, Matt pounced like a classy jaguar & announced his victory! Another reflection of Matt’s razor-sharp ability is the instance when, a long time after discussing with a couple how they first met, on some website called Hot or Not, near the end of the show he asked the lady her her name.  She replied ‘Lacey,’ & Matt immediately recalled that this was a perfect name for someone on Hot or Not.

 

https://youtu.be/KWDJGRrvUow

Matt has been a permanent resident in Edinburgh just a couple of months now, & his show is the distilled quintessence of his comedy career so far ‘down south‘. Its good, the boy’s got talent, & I look forward already to next year when the Scottish osmosis kicks in & his material begins to be penetrated by living in one of the world’s finest, & windiest, cultural capitals. Of his recent arrival in the city, Matt told us;

It’s amazing and I absolutely love the city and the beautiful surrounding area. Best pubs, great cinemas and theatres, amazing people and plenty of discount supermarkets (I live next to a Lidl/ Iceland combo store!). I even enjoyed visiting Dunfermline. However, I am still not used to having conversations with neighbours that last 20 mins or having the heater on in July, but I’m sure I’ll get used to that. Right!!??

Material:  Delivery:   Laughs:  

Gilded Balloon Teviot
Aug 2-28 (23.30)

When rowdy, raucous & rambunctious is executed with as much as sexiness as Australian Kaitlyn Rogers pours into her onstage persona, there is nothing to stop our hearts pounding with unpurged pleasure. She’s hot, she’s happy, she flicks out her moves with the poetry of a ballet dancer, she’s got it, big time. Her show, ‘Can I Get An Amen’ is an internationally appreciated sermon on the saintly wisdom of Whoopi Goldberg, & delivered with her self-crowned status of ‘queen of the sass,’ as taught in the popular ashrams ran by American all-girl group, Destiny’s Child. A flamingo of some fluffiness, in a recent interview with The Mumble, Kaitlyn described the origins of her creation:

I wrote and devised the show myself by locking myself in a room and trying to make myself laugh. For a long time I didn’t know if the show would work because it’s definitely an absurd comedy that doesn’t sit in any one genre. It’s part clown. Part stand up. And a complete hot mess

https://youtu.be/gpM3Z8JKasI

This is Kaitlyn’s first Fringe, & early in the run, & you can tell — she’s so energetic & full of enthusiasm, & greets her audience one-by-one as they leave AND depart the room at the uppermost turret-tops of the Teviot. Inbetween she has us eating, or rather licking, out of the palms of her mesmerizing, silky hands as she weaves her magic like a sensuous comedy sorceress. Clad in a skin-clinging, leopard-skin catsuit, this hyperactive, golden-tinged darling lady is confident in her abilities. ‘Oh My God!’ she chirps, ‘this part is so fucking sick!’ & she was right to be so cocky, as were all the sections of her set except for one dramatic lull near the end, which comes on as sudden as a Tuscan sea-storm, & definitely one dramatic step too far for a polite British audience. But this was the calm before the inevitable hurricane finale, & when the audience were queuing up to get a photo taken with Kaitlyn as they leave, you know you’re in the presence of a proper star

Reviewer : Damo

 

The Community Project
Aug 6-13, 15-27 (18.45)

Material:  Delivery:  Laughs:  

Tucked away in a small room within the Grassmarket Community Centre, the energetic Sian & Zoe were waiting to unleash their mysterious concoction of sketch comedy and stand up. A “Sugar Coma Fever Nightmare” was created and designed for our pleasure by this young, female duo, and as darkness becomes light the nightmare scenario begins. With so much comedy around at the Fringe you never know what you are going to get, but, with Sian and Zoe you get it all. This show is faster than losing your Toupee in a Hurricane. They come at you like a bullet from a gun, hitting you in every part of your body with side-splitting jokes and sketches that relight the art of comedy sketching. In a recent interview with The Mumble, Sian encapsulated the essence of their show as being;

…still very much an alternative comedy show, so there’s lots of visual business and the offbeat stuff that we like. But the dream setting has given us loads to play with in terms of characters and sketches that exist just outside of reality. Please note that although the show is dream-themed, we have put a lot of work into it so having a nap through the show will not produce the same effect.

Clambering through the audience with their dreamcatchers, it is not long before they have taken over your life and for the next hour you are theirs to do what every they want with. The creativeness of this show allows the audience in and we were there, the duo pounced, swooping down like an eagle at full speed & gobbling you up without remorse. The acting and miming was refreshing to see, Charlie Chaplin would be a proud patriarch! The eating of a computer, the super hero that is Scrabble Man and the confusion that ISIS was the International Space Station was just for starters…

This nicely crafted piece of theatre, sketches and story-telling has you eating at your thoughts while laughing your heart out. People always say that kids say the funniest things but Sian and Zoe trump that by saying even funnier things. Hilarious, entertaining, witty, direct and clever, trust within yourself and go see this wee gem of a show as it should not be missed. A real joy and one off this year’s highlights thus far !!!!!

Reviewed by Raymondo

Just the Tonic at The Caves
Aug 3-27 (17.00)

Material:  Delivery:  Laughs:  

Gary Tro made his full room roar in laughter with Supercalifragilisticexpi Gary Trocious. A very amiable comedian, he roams about the comedy aether like a giddy zephyr, discussing last year’s fringe failure, his desire to run a marathon, his tendency to date girls with the same name, baldness, procrastination, lying, dolphins, love, dreams,children and, of course, Gary Tro. SA great variety of spices go into his comedy curry, but never too much, & the final result is a tasty dish indeed.

Gary is extremely accomodating with his audience, making us all feel a part of the show and he improvises with distinction surfing each spontaneous responses like a seasoned Bali surfer on a Beach Break. In a recent interview with The Mumble, Tro said the part of performing he loves most is;

The immediacy. I genuinely believe that the best art and performance happens in the moment. The biggest laugh that every comedian has ever had has come from something that they didn’t plan to do.

Tro allowed space for the ‘moment’ to happen and it helped relax his audience & let us connect with both comic & show. It takes skill from the performer for we spectators to feel so comfortable to have so honest interactions, but Gary is a wee master of the vibe. Supercalifragilisticexpi Gary Trocious is not easy to spell, but it is easy to have good laugh at.

Reviewer : Michael Beeson