Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Stuart Laws Has to Be Joking? | Dan Lees: Vinyl Reflections + more

Stuart Laws Has to Be Joking? | Ed Moore

Stuart Laws Has to Be Joking? ★★★★

Monkey Barrel - The Hive (Venue 313) until 25 August

How do you embark upon a healthy and fulfilling relationship when you don’t understand why you behave and react the way you do? Stuart Laws explores this with the lightest, funniest of touches in a show that approaches neurodivergence in a way you won’t have seen before.

He says that, as a teenager, he faked a personality, and treated books about human behaviour and body language like survival skill manuals. Later on, he’d struggle in romantic partnerships, often staying in them for too long because he didn’t understand the rules of the game.

He was in the middle of his Fringe run last year, on the cusp of turning 40, when he received his autism diagnosis. This coincided with him beginning to fall for someone, and for the first time in his life was able to be fully open about who he was. She, too, had something to reveal, which helps us feel even more invested in this optimistic journey.

If this all sounds a bit onerous, please, please do not worry: Laws is one of the most skilled and likeable comics on the circuit, and he knows exactly how to swirl insight about his particular type of neurodivergence into a deliciously joke-dense show. In fact, even if you were dead-set against learning anything you’d still have a whale of a time with his gags.

One minute he’s arguing - quite convincingly - why Jesus was autistic; the next he’s building up some ironically sophisticated toilet humour, toying with a smutty call-back that shapeshifts in the cleverest manner.

Throughout this carefully structured hour, Laws treats the audience as if we were starting out on a relationship together, beginning with the awkward small talk and then, right at the end, making a decision about whether things should progress. Let's hope it does.

Ashley Davies

Dan Lees: Vinyl Reflections ★★★★

PBH's Free Fringe @ Banshee Labyrinth (Venue 156) until 25 August

Sometimes you find yourself sitting in a room going absolutely wild with laughter and enjoyment for the performer onstage. Had this audience loved Dan Lees any more there would have been fluids involved.

Lees is a lovely clown, and is sweetly silent for the first five minutes, just his face doing the talking. For me, this is his greatest skill.

He brilliantly creates a narrative song (enthusiastically sung by us) out of gesticulations, before donning a wig, strapping on a guitar and 'transforming' into Russ Conway. Which is odd, because Conway played the piano.

Lees scours charity shops for old album covers - like Conway's Songs to Sing in Your Bath. A quick suggestion of a track from the album, a looped backing track and we are off.

What Lees does is so clever in terms of risk/reward. He harnesses the power of people's love of joining in a hookline and the simplicity of repetition to turn maybe a dozen words into ten minutes of hilarity. The entire room sang “too many crumbs ” with a joy that would delight even Prue Leith.

Stephen Bishop's 1980 Bowling in Paris gives Lees a chance to showcase more poetic talent but still the skill is in manipulating the audience, channelling their enthusiasm into chanting those hooklines, swaying, clapping and clicking fingers.

This is a masterclass in audience control. Perfectly intelligent people are flapping their arms and waving their legs around on his command.

As we head towards the climax (when you see the show you will realise that there is simply no other way to describe Lees' extraordinary finale) we get an hilarious piece about forgotten passwords and bark along with a singing dog. As you do. At least you do when Dan Lees is leading the fun. .

Kate Copstick

Zoe Brownstone: A Bite Of Yours ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard - Bunker Three (Venue 33) until 23 August

Describing herself as a “hopeless romantic”, Zoe Brownstone's Fringe debut places varying degrees of emphases on that loaded phrase.

The London-based Canadian comic is a really intriguing voice, somewhat jaded for sure and seldom pandering in her Fringe debut, repeatedly making reminders of her low-level drug dealing past. Yet she's instantly, easily likeable, playfully asking the crowd to suggest literally any film and giving increasingly contrived reasons for classing it in the romantic comedy genre.

The central plank of her show is the story of how she came to be a stepmother in Holland, following a whirlwind romance. With hindsight and in the retelling there were red flags aplenty in the courtship, not least with the pressure placed by others on Brownstone and her Dutchman, bridesmaid and best man at her sister's wedding, to hook up. That it all went sour is no surprise as the comic hardly sets it up as a big reveal, even if the manner of the fallout seems extreme.

What's particularly intriguing though is the nugget of personal information that Brownstone then discloses, sort of obvious in retrospect, but one which seems particularly charged in the current climate.

I'm honestly not entirely sure how it colours the show but I can understand her hesitation in making it a thing. Regardless, it's good to have her in the UK and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

Jay Richardson

Isabelle Farah: Nebuchadnezzar ★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Studio 5) (Venue 17) until 25 August

Sad to report, but Isabelle Farah's latest, high-concept show feels underwritten and unfinished. Certainly, the fact that the British-Lebanese comic, an accomplished performer who has previously delivered masterful Fringe shows about her life and heritage, opens with a significant amount of club comedy-style crowd interrogation doesn't bode well.

An ambitious, alternative history of Nebuchadnezzar, the ancient king of Babylon, torn between his warlike and romantic impulses, with satirical correspondences for our own time, the piece was originally conceived as a sitcom, she explains. Whether that transpires, it doesn't come close to working as a live show yet.

Jay Richardson