Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Susie McCabe | Lou Taylor | Abby Wambaugh

Get ready to laugh with our latest flurry of Edinburgh Festival Fringe comedy reviews for 2024.

Susie McCabe: Merchant of Menace | Pic: Andrew Jackson/Curse These Eyes

Susie McCabe: Merchant of Menace

Assembly George Square (Venue 17), until 25 August

★★★★

Susie McCabe may have had a tiny heart attack just before the Fringe, but nothing was going to stop her bringing this beauty of a show to Edinburgh in August.

This is a clever, creative and life-affirmingly funny show in which McCabe explores some of the strange things that happen when you go out of your comfort zone. It all kicks off with a stay in a five-star hotel, where Susie and her wife decide to spend their wedding night. Everything is bewildering. Susie, whose facial expressions are a treat, genuinely wonders how anyone can live like this.

This sets Susie thinking about how we behave in unfamiliar places, and about what makes us feel at home. There’s a wonderful encounter with a tethered owl called Geraldine on Edinburgh High Street who becomes an extended metaphor throughout the show. Geraldine, who Susie impersonates with glee, is out of place.

McCabe wonders why it can be so hard for people to be flexible.  She touches on issues of self-confidence, of class and of education, and there’s a flash of rage towards the people in power who want to keep the status quo. She loves being a woman, being Scottish, being a lesbian, but there are still things holding her back; some are in her mind, others come from society, from family and friends.

It’s perfectly possible to enjoy this show as a lovely funny series of ridiculous stories but it’s also a meditation on life and happiness. It ends with a poem, which is an odd choice but another example of McCabe’s determination to break free from other people’s expectations. It’s an absolute joy to see her so confident and in command, and the audience, not just a Scottish but an international crowd, loves every minute of it. Claire Smith

Lou Taylor in Jeans and a nice top at the Edinburgh Fringe | Michael Julings

Lou Taylor: Jeans and a nice top

Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three) (Venue 33), until 25 August

★★★

Nostalgia for the 1990s is enjoying a moment in stand-up just now. And newcomer Lou Taylor's contribution is a frank but affectionate reminisce about teenage fashions, flirtations and fumblings, sufficiently adult in theme and execution to stop it becoming insipid. Bookended by her appearance on seminal kids show Live & Kicking, it's bizarre guest booking policy absolutely insane with hindsight, Taylor can identify the best and worst of her formative years.

She's strong on the cultural shifts and her own insecurities but with a perky sex positivity for her not always romantic experimentation, which has continued into her thirties. Plenty of stand-up shows use pre-filmed videos to pad out an hour. But Taylor's are a cut above, really elucidating her routines and featuring a classy supporting cast of Lorna Rose Treen, Katie Norris, Matt Highton, Dan Cook and married sketch act Short & Curly, sucking the face off each other in a display of hilarious, anachronistic horniness.

By no means a rose-tinted view of the period, with Taylor pointing out the deeply inappropriate sexualisation in a popular board game she played for example, she nevertheless captures the excitement and relative innocence of coming-of-age in the era before social media. Affably charming and with a keen sense of her own foibles, this is a solidly funny debut. Jay Richardson

Abby Wambaugh: The First 3 Minutes of 17 Shows

Pleasance Courtyard (Attic) (Venue 33), until 26 August

★★★

Blending goofy sketches and deeply personal stand-up with considerable aplomb, Abby Wambaugh's Fringe debut is high-concept, theatrically ambitious and audacious. To an extent, it's the story of how the Denmark-based American became a comedian. But it's so, so much more than that, with the conceit that Wambaugh tried to write 17 different shows but was unable to settle on a satisfying one, and so presents the first three minutes (ish) of each of them.

What starts as seemingly throwaway nonsense, with an early skit featuring the usually composed, gently ironic comic furiously sucking at an audience member's leg as she impersonates a vacuum cleaner, a lot of fruit-based material as she portrays both a banana and an orange, gradually becomes a deceptively complex, expositionary patchwork.

Through more sincere, straightforward bits we learn that, contrary to appearances and her own expectations, Wambaugh isn't a lesbian, is a mother-of-two but identifies as non-binary, contextualising that gender presentation with the aforementioned orange puppet act, sending up the cultural sensitivities around such matters with a Sesame Street-style primer. Incorporating a bit of good-natured audience interaction, it's a bit hit and miss but generally fun, yet running underneath everything is a darker subtext that gradually emerges, at the core of Wambaugh's being and why she became a comic. Jay Richardson

Mel & Sam: High Pony

Pleasance Courtyard (Below) (Venue 33), until 25 August

★★★

Quite the ride, Mel O'Brien and Sam Andrew's blazing, late-night musical sketch show has a peculiar energy that's all their own, borne of a harmonious chemistry and sassily expressive attitude. From their big, bold introductory opening number, the young Australian duo own the stage. Sex and queer sexuality are to the fore in their assertive humour, shaped by the formative influence of the Twilight saga in one of their more archly teasing and progressive early skits.

Yet there's plenty of silliness for its own sake too, even if a whimsical scenario of self-identity developed out of the Where's Wally books gets exponentially darker and darker until they're nodding towards Madeleine McCann. The sheer, in-your-face punkishness of the pair ensures that they may only ever have selective appeal. And they seldom take time out to pander or ingratiate, insisting that, and let's be frank here, older, heteronormative audiences, catch up with them.

But despite Andrew's songwriting verve, suffused with a deep love of big show tunes, and O'Brien's lusty vocals, they're smart enough to vary their output, interjecting throwaway quickies into the mix between their longer set-pieces. Eluding the distinctions between a show and a party, they're niche and flighty for sure, but powered by irrepressible wattage. Jay Richardson

Ray O'Leary: Your Laughter Is Just Making Me Stronger

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

★★★

In a cheap-looking suit and with his flat, almost monotone voice, Ray O'Leary isn't your archetypal stand-up. With jokes inspired by his philosophy degree and with his compulsion to endlessly dissect and pick apart the most everyday phenomenon, including his purchase of a mattress protector and a desk, the Kiwi is a distinctive comic you have to lean into, appreciating the rigorously funny logic of an agile, analytical mind.

Although he emphasises his social awkwardness, to the extent of doing an impression of a struggling comedian, derides hack comedy and will play with repetition and deconstruction till it stretches the audience's patience, you must admire the invention and observational nous, the discipline of his writing allows him to pull off some pretty dark abortion gags early on. Unfortunately, the irony of his show title is that he's clearly a confident performer and, on the night I saw him, visibly began to wilt in his self-assurance as he wasn't perhaps getting the reaction he'd hoped for.

Ending the show abruptly early to the widespread bafflement of an audience that wasn't hugely pumped up but was by no means not enjoying the material, it was a shame, O'Leary's shambling discomfort in his own skin is obviously not entirely an act. Jay Richardson