Sumit Anand: Nothing About Godzilla

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VENUE: Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

TIME: 7pm – 8pm, 31 Jul – 26 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: £10 – £12

To survive in the standup business, you need to be seriously adaptable. There’s an interesting bit in Sumit Anand’s debut hour, for example, where he thanks the audience as a whole for telling lies, big and small, every day. But tonight, “I can thank all of you individually,” he realises, and does. It is pretty sparse on this rainy evening, but he makes the best of it. Eventually.

Anand is a rapid riser, only beginning on the burgeoning Indian circuit five years ago. He does seem slightly thrown by the empty rows here, early on—doing an impromptu survey about how we heard about the gig is an odd way

Kelly Convey: Phone Voice

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VENUE: Pleasance Courtyard

TIME: 7:15pm – 8:15pm, 31 Jul – 25 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: £7.50 – £10

Kelly Convey is best known in the world of comedy for her appearance on Channel 4’s First Dates, in which she was matched with a misogynist who told her that women are incapable of being funny to a professional standard. Things seem to be looking up for her now.

For starters, she’s out of the to start one—but begins to find a groove after the first laughs are prised from this damp gathering.

As he suggests, with a livelier crowd the comic would be too, but tonight he’s philosophical, rattling off quotes from great minds, then rubbishing those ideas in a droll fashion. His own route through life is rather thoughtful and passive, and he bemoans the lost joys of childhood, those two simple settings, “playing, or crying.” We dating game and settled in a serious relationship with which she’s clearly very happy. Secondly, she’s debuting at the Fringe with an offering that will inevitably win praise for its insightful look at class and bags of easygoing charm.

Convey is a natural with a strong comedic voice. She’s consistently funny here, and isn’t afraid to go off script, so Telephone Voice is enough for now. In delivering a nostalgic work full of allusions to a misspent childhood and the family she’s grown up around, the star is clearly keen that we get to know her. She succeeds to this effect, but it feels like she’s testing the waters. It’s almost as though we’re watching a pilot. The real work will come later, hopefully by which time adults spend two long worrying about the stuff in between.

Anand is an intriguing character to spend time with, and his own quirks are apparently masochistic. As a kid he slapped himself repeatedly in the face, after father slapped him first. More recently he crashed his car into a parked one, on purpose, because why not? And then he flies here to put on a Fringe show. It’s fun watching him roll with it. ✏︎ Si Hawkins she’ll have decided against doing impressions of her Jamaican next door neighbour. ✏︎ Lewis Porteous

Lucy Pearman: Baggage HHH

VENUE: Monkey Barrel Comedy

TIME: 4:30pm – 5:30pm, 2–25 Aug, not 13, 14

TICKETS: £8

Lucy Pearman’s outlandish solo show wants to strip us of our burdens. Packed inside a suitcase, she needs to get through luggage allowance. Each time she tries, she’s rejected and told she’s “too much”. Over the course of the absurdist show, Pearman asks for our help, wanting to get to the “just right” marker.

Weighed on the scales via the arms of an audience member, Pearman keeps stripping herself down—possessions, clothes, skin—all the while trying desperately to make herself fit measures determined by other people. For a show about fragility, this inventive hour of clowning is

Aaron Simmonds: Disabled Coconut HHH

VENUE: Underbelly, Bristo Square

TIME: 1:30pm – 2:30pm, 31 Jul –

26 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: £9 – £10

It may seem like an odd complaint to level against a standup, but Aaron Simmonds really does like to talk about himself. While the labyrinthine series of coincidences and chance messy and destructive. The show itself is lighter than its conceit. Often blending the twee and the grotesque, Pearman is an eager host, in turn welcoming and acerbic. As we help her offload through a series of increasingly over-literal tasks, she is generous by the bucketload, and her genial manner makes us so keen to take part that one audience member accidentally goes up uninvited.

Packing never quite goes to plan. Tech fizzles and breaks at every opportunity, while an unnecessary aide in a black morph suit haphazardly helps her out with stage management. Pearman is so charming it hardly matters, but the overreliance on props in the first place gets in the way.

Buried in the bag under all the jumpers and jokes is Pearman’s fear of moving away, and of leaving bits of herself behind. Though fairly on-the-nose, Baggage is handled with care. An irreverent, playful demonstration of how we’re all just holding ourselves together. ✏︎ Kate Wyver encounters he relates to us here is admittedly anecdotal gold that few comedians could resist using as the basis of a Fringe show, Disabled Coconut is seriously lacking in universal detail. An audience will likely remember it as a list of things that allegedly happened to a man, as opposed to something in any way familiar or relatable. Ultimately, we feel little connection to the performer or his very well-told story.

The show revolves around two incidents. One sees Simmonds— who has cerebral palsy—find love at a gig in a venue with poor wheelchair access. The other incident revolves around a Twitter feud with a fellow disabled person, who trolls the performer for not being disabled enough.

Both strands tie together with such ease that one can only assume artistic licence has played a part in structuring the narrative. It’s just too satisfying. What is essentially a big-hearted and unconventional love story comes across as an oddly contrived helping of exposition.

Simmonds is a supremely confident and intelligent performer with authoritative delivery, but his ultimate downfall is that he’s slick to the point that we lose trust in him. ✏︎ Lewis Porteous

Daliso Chaponda: Blah Blah Blacklist

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VENUE: Gilded Balloon Teviot

TIME: 6:30pm – 7:30pm, 31 Jul –26 Aug, not 14

TICKETS: £12 – £14

Daliso Chaponda isn’t angry anymore, just disappointed. The Malawian comedian despairs at the domino effect toppling all his fallen heros. When he got started in comedy he was told that if he worked hard he could be like Bill Cosby. Now, that seems like a pretty low bar to aim for.

Chaponda is loud but his comedy is gentle. Blah Blah Blacklist may not have the tightness of the set that got him to the finals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2015, but retains the cheekiness, pleasantly meandering through his new relationship, his post-colonial upbringing in central Africa which

Jenny Bede: The Musical HHH

VENUE: Just the Tonic at The Mash House

TIME: 5:05pm – 6pm, 1–25 Aug, not 12

TICKETS: £5

In the early naughties Jenny Bede was in the obscure girl band Cherry Falls. She mentions this infrequently before leaving the full video evidence—their unorthodox cover of an eighties classic— playing as the audience leave. Only we won’t leave. Bede, at the back of the room with her bucket, is left

“trained me for the UK”, and the stoic boringness of white church. A warm performer, his hearty laugh intersects stories of getting stuck in a national front demo—“it looked like fun”—and being a back-up to Idris Elba when papers need a black celebrity to rail against racism. While his brief set on teaching us how not to be accidentally racist feels like a grouped bunch of viral tweets, his anecdotes are far funnier.

There’s nothing radical about Chaponda’s arguments, he’s simply humorously cranky at other people’s failures. The set ramps up a little in tension when he talks about his father being arrested, delving into the idea of belief and certainty of innocence, before leaning back into an easy-going set on cancel culture and legacy.

In a rare ernest moment he makes space for grey area, suggesting that none of us is perfect. Then again, he says with a wink, maybe he’s just bullet-proofing himself for the future. ✏︎ Kate Wyver shouting: “Why are you watching this shit?”

We’re meant to watch for a bit – she’s set it up that way. But there is a sense the younger Bede in the video, mocked by today’s Bede in tonight’s show, has travelled forward in time to have the last laugh. Because although Cherry Fall’s version of Fine Young Cannibals’ ‘She Drives Me Crazy’ has the comedic cringe factor of someone reading out your teenage love letters, it’s also a lot closer to the real thing—to fame— than most of us here will ever get. And so we keep watching.

The story of Cherry Falls, however, remains the path-nottaken in Bede’s third Fringe show.

From the top, she demonstrates her repertoire as an actor and singer, with a piercing sting of social commentary as she lists the pigeonholed bit-parts from her CV and showreel. She frames it together with the idea that musical-man of the moment Cameron Mackintosh is here to see all the musicals she’s written. As a structural device it works fine, but it doesn’t match her talents. Bede is strongest when she loses herself in the songs, letting her vocal range sing for itself.

Jenny Bede: The Musical leaves a strong impression of obvious ability, but also one where a compelling story is left loitering as the subplot. ✏︎ Ben Venables