Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Amy Gledhill: Make Me Look Fit on the Poster | Trevor Lock: Audience Anonymous/Let's Start a Cult! | Mel Owen: Chunky Monkey | Greg Larsen: Revolting | Sex and Drugs and Getting Old 2

The magnificent Amy Gledhill has both bright knickers and mortifying stories to share in a masterclass of comic storytelling, leading our latest batch of Fringe comedy reviews. Words by Ashley Davies, Kate Copstick and Jay Richardson

Voice of the beehive: Amy Gledhill | Contributed

COMEDY

Amy Gledhill: Make Me Look Fit on the Poster ★★★★

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 515) until 25 August

Amy Gledhill is a woman in possession of a treasure trove of funny stories from her life – and boy, does she know how to animate them. She sets the atmosphere straight away by distributing a box of brightly coloured knickers for us to throw at her, before launching into a tale about the time she needed to be rescued while dangling “like a ginger bauble” from a tree at Go Ape. Every bit of the misadventure is hilarious, as is her mime of the experience and her playful conjugation of “go” in the adventure park’s title.

Further anecdotes about mishaps follow, all infused with glorious detail and potential or real embarrassment. One minute she’s mimicking an internet troll who hasn’t quite got his head around what kind of body weight is considered an insult; the next she’s regaling us with the ins and outs of her bedroom performance – with an unforgettable simile involving a dog toy.

Gledhill shares a daft story about feeling mortified after giving some Toby Carvery advice to a person who really doesn’t need to hear it, and further demonstrates her superior comic acting skills in recounting the effects of her massage chair during a manicure.

But, amid all the hilarious calamities, Gledhill – who, at one point asks an audience member to describe her appearance – also wants to discuss moments when she’s been made to feel bad about the way she looks. She still has a stinging letter written by a university boyfriend, and reveals a little about how she felt after an uncomfortable experience during a recent train journey.

As she puts it, when you’re in a cycle of low self-esteem, you start to accept poor treatment. As with her Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated solo debut, The Girl Before the Girl You Marry, there’s pain beneath this hour. But you might not notice until you’ve finally stopped laughing. Ashley Davies

COMEDY

Trevor Lock: Audience Anonymous ★★★

PHB’s Free Fringe @ Bannerman's (Venue 357) until 25 August

Trevor Lock: Let’s Start a Cult! ★★★

PHB’s Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms (Venue 68) until 25 August

Audience Anonymous is a clever show. Were it not that Trevor Lock is such a genuinely lovely man, I would say fiendishly clever. We, his audience, are all part of a WhatsApp group created by Lock. We are encouraged to look around, check each other out, choose our favourite person in the room and we are off and running. Well, not exactly running, but messaging. The premise of the show is that we frequently do find other people fascinating but lack the confidence to make contact. Current social mores make it more acceptable to share an opinion online than live. And this is what we do. Within Lock's group we ask questions, answer, comment, compliment and criticise. We choose our “favourite person”. And Lock is part agent provocateur, part MC. All manner of extraordinary things have come out of these shows, we are told. Even an engagement. When we gain the confidence to pop our heads above the digital parapet and communicate “live” then things hot up. There is a whole improvised scenario with Lock's “ex-wife” in the third row. This is crowd work taken to the next level.

On the other side of town Lock encourages us to form a cult. He has cult experience himself and, in its broadest sense, the “cult” is much more prevalent that you might think. What is fascinating – once Lock points it out to us – is how quickly a room can divide and reshape itself along lines which Lock draws. Psychologically, it is fascinating, and in Lock’s hands, funny too. He has more fun with five latecomers than you can possibly imagine. He is the master of crowd manipulation and all our laughter is with each other, not at each other. We nominate and choose our cult leader and decide on “core values”. Lock gently squeezes the comic juice out of everything. The ploy of getting members of the audience to keep notes and then reading them out is a Lock standard and, here, reaps a fine harvest of laughter. These shows are always different, always fascinating and always fun. Kate Copstick

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COMEDY

Mel Owen: Chunky Monkey ★★★

Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16) until 24 August

Billed as an hour, verbally pledged to be 45 minutes, but actually delivered as the full 60, it's hard to know if this qualifies as Mel Owen's full Fringe debut. What it is though is a great introduction to a really promising, relatively new stand-up. Chattily vivacious, the Welsh comic gets plenty of mileage out of her difficulties dating and maintaining relationships while hailing from the countryside. Like Kiri Pritchard-McLean, with whom she shares a similar engaging warmth, she's also a Welsh farmer's daughter and capably evokes the differences between living in the country and living in the city. 

On the cusp of turning 30, she's self-deprecating about her travails with men. But as the product of Welsh and Jamaican parentage, there's an intersectional feminism to her tales too and her show title comes from the grim nickname she acquired from one particular suitor. Despite this, Owen tends to package even her bleaker material lightly. And gossip fans will enjoy her interactions with Hugh Jackman, Usain Bolt and, er, Saddam Hussein and the Daily Mail's sidebar of shame, all presented with a mix of girlish enthusiasm for the initial encounter and rueful wisdom after the fact. Definitely one to watch out for. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Greg Larsen: Revolting ★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Dexter) (Venue 302) until 25 August

A man of gargantuan lusts and insecurities, with a brutally dark and twisted sense of humour, Greg Larsen is a truly compelling comic voice. Scared, depressed and having virtually exhausted the bleaker corners of the internet, the Australian and self-avowed nihilist is a smart commentator on modern, existential malaise, fulminating against the vapid mental health advice that he's received.

A big, imposing character, he's got a chequered but interesting past as well, most memorably as an initially reluctant pornographer who suddenly discovered that he had a talent for parting horny men from their money in the early days of webcamming. If that tale is richly compelling however, his memories of being a feckless music student, coasting through his easy degree and the goth member of a political punk band are rather patchier. Generally speaking, whenever he embraced his epicurean lusts in sexual or narcotic excess, the results are a transgressive delight. 

Yet while he's wry about his muddled political thinking and identity shifts, the drift of his further education days infect these stories somewhat, inhibiting him at his bellicose or despairing best. As a Fringe debut then, Revolting stands as a real curate's egg: three-quarters roaring brilliance with a mischievous edge, a quarter meandering tales that don't really amount to much. Jay Richardson

COMEDY 

Sex and Drugs and Getting Old 2 ★★★

Laughing Horse @ Eastside (Venue 164) until 25 August

Andy Zapp knows more than most about each of these things and is very generous in the sharing of his knowledge. He is, it would seem, getting increasingly potty-mouthed as he gets older. He has also developed an in-depth, close up and personal knowledges of hormone replacement creams and patches. There are immediate challenges for Andy – a goodly proportion of his audience have not heard of Ian Dury and most of them are strangers to Oscar Wilde. Strange combination in an opening routine, you might think, but that is the kind of show this is. 

We get peeing in the sink and colonisation, drugs on the NHS and chubbies in priority seats and every so often he apologises for not having started the show yet. To say the show is sexually graphic in its language is like saying heroin is relaxing. It is quite something watching him perched on his high chair chucking little shock grenades at us. It is fun, watching an older bloke taking his naughty parts for a gallop. You will never see a picture of an aardvark again without thinking of Andy Zapp. Or, indeed, order a KFC. Kate Copstick