Edinburgh Fringe Comedy reviews: Dylan Mulvaney: FAGHAG | Jamie Lerner: F*ck Tomorrow | Mad Ron's Character Comedy Carnage | Ross McGrane: Get Rich or Cry Trying | Reginald D Hunter: Fluffy Fluffy Beavers | Alexander Bennett: Emotional Daredevil

Social media sensation Dylan Mulvaney stars in a riotously entertaining musical celebration of her life and post-lockdown fame, kicking off our latest batch of Fringe comedy reviews. Words by Claire Smith, Kate Copstick and Jay Richardson

Angelic: Dylan Mulvaney in FAGHAG | Marc Brenner

COMEDY

Dylan Mulvaney: FAGHAG ★★★★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 25 August

Well, I didn’t expect this. Dylan Mulvaney has made a musical out of her own life story which is funny, stylish, riotously entertaining and quite possibly the campest thing you will ever see in your life.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Mulvaney accidentally became the most famous trans person in the world by making videos on the internet during lockdown. Our heroine greets her audience as they enter the auditorium. She is wearing giant angel wings and Nancy Sinatra boots, smiling beatifically, and posing for the odd sneaky selfie with her fans. And then she is born. The booming voice of God brings little Dylan into the world in a boy’s body. Surely there is some mistake!

Against a backdrop of pastel-coloured ornaments and rows of Barbies we see little Dylan grow up into a musical theatre kid with a part-time job selling expensive hand cream in Lush. It seems she is destined to be the kind of cute gay boy known as a twink. Then comes Covid – and something odd starts to happen. The twink starts talking to God. Dylan decides to start dressing up as a girl, and begins posting videos of herself online.

After an uplifting musical interlude in which Dylan conducts the funeral for her boy self, she is suddenly swept up into global fame. She’s at the White House, she’s Woman of the Year, she’s advertising beer. It’s a ludicrous story. But as we all know, it’s true. Dylan’s fall from grace comes when the companies who courted her as an advertising gimmick begin to suffer a backlash. Her famous friends don’t answer her calls. She’s hated. Yet we know she is a perfect little Catholic angel inside.

This lush production, directed by Tim Jackson, hurtles along. Be warned, if you’re not as young and as LGBTQ+ as this 20-something crowd, a lot of the cultural references will whizz over your head. But you cannot help but empathise with Dylan as she finds herself falling through space wondering what destiny God has planned for her. And you genuinely rejoice when the answer to all her troubles literally falls from the sky. None of this makes any sense. But it all happened. And our heroine is here in front of us, likeable, smart, sweet and, thank goodness, happy to laugh, dance and sing about it all. Claire Smith

COMEDY

Jamie Lerner: F*ck Tomorrow ★★★

PBH's Free Fringe @ Southsider (Venue 148) until 25 August

This is an absolutely charming show by a New Yorker who just happens to swear a lot, had her first relationship aged six and thinks she might be a little bit bi. She creates such a wholesome atmosphere with her easy chat about racism, vaginas (her own, don’t worry) and why she loves unrequited love, that we all join in, as encouraged, with the hookline of her song “Blame the Jews”.

The sweet'n'spicy combination in comedy is tougher to achieve than it might seem but Lerner manages the mix just perfectly. Deliciously piquant. (I say this even though she divides the room into 20s, 30s and “old”.)

She can also time a gag to hit the comedy sweet spot right on the nose. We get fantasy funeral songs, quite a lot of creative childhood masturbation and a persuasive argument as to why men should be like bees. All of this, and more, is packed into Lerner’s first festival appearance. She was, she tells us, advised that a Fringe show must have a beginning, a middle and an end and apologises for not managing to do that, instead offering “just chaos”. Well, let’s hear it for chaos. Kate Copstick

COMEDY

Mad Ron's Character Comedy Carnage ★★★

Laughing Horse @ City Cafe (Venue 85) until 25 August

Mad Ron himself is a delightfully unreconstructed hardman. Not that hard. But definitely hard enough to register on the geezer scale. He despises those who vape, yearns for the days when soap was solid and has funny diatribes about vegetarians, Liverpool, lettuce and France.

He is an excellent MC, pushing on through the show because the hour has three characters crammed into it, first of which is Kitty Cassis, astrologist/beautician, followed by Mr French Fries, who crams more visual gags and sound effects into his set than would seem possible. The randomness actually helps the comedy a lot, as you feel he is as clueless as we are. The room gets quite competitive over his game of Catchphrase but before things get too heated, Ron introduces Jerry Bakewell whose Mexican wrestler outfit belies the cleverness of his act.

Ron and Jerry do a two-hander, I am told, and on the basis of tonight I think it might be rather good. Jerry just might be the only comic you will see this August doing quality accountant material, long form “shape-based gangs” gags and alliterative tongue twisters about Portobello. Impressive stuff. Kate Copstick

We're offering 40% off an annual digital subscription to The Scotsman, so you can enjoy a summer of amazing content for less. Checkout using promo code SUMMER40. Subscribe at www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

COMEDY

Ross McGrane: Get Rich or Cry Trying ★★★

Just The Tonic Legends (Just the Tonic at The Subway) (Venue 27) until 25 August

Essentially an hour-long yelp of “how much?!”, Ross McGrane's Fringe debut will strike a chord with many in a cost of living crisis. A 37-year-old father of one, he adroitly identifies the modern malaise of having more “stuff” than his parents, who raised him on an Essex council estate, but struggling to pay for his daughter's happiness, bled dry by the likes of Center Parcs, Barbie and the Build-A-Bear Workshop.

He casts some blame on the aspirational culture of social media but he's painfully aware of his own role in creating this situation, his insecure stand-up vocation and marrying into the middle-class putting him under greater pressure. Although he can protest a little too much, his incredulity is generally well pitched, relatable and consistently funny: he is also invariably the butt of the joke. That's brought home with the dubious display of masculine reassurance that this germaphobe and hypochondriac brought to his daughter's birth, from which the only way is up.

Deceptively sharp on generational and class tensions, yet related with a bloke-down-the-pub casualness, Get Rich or Cry Trying is a reasonably priced, early afternoon investment of your time and hard-earned cash. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Reginald D Hunter: Fluffy Fluffy Beavers ★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 26 August

What is ailing Reginald D Hunter? He seems jittery and on edge. He says he feels like Muhammad Ali before the Rumble in the Jungle, but he doesn’t look ready for anything. Since Covid he says, his dreams have become nightmares. And he describes them to us: graphic, sexually charged visions of horror all delivered in that world-class resonant voice. The joke, such as it is, turns out to be that each of these ghastly apparitions is a metaphor for political reality.

It’s crude, unsophisticated and in deliberately bad taste. A woman in the crowd loudly objects to his depiction of Israel in this way and is jeered by the audience. She and her husband leave the venue. The whole thing is ugly. Hunter, far from being some sort of warrior, limps off the stage after 40 minutes, having completely run out of steam. He is, he tells us, contractually obliged to stay for that length of time. Claire Smith

COMEDY

Alexander Bennett: Emotional Daredevil ★★

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 26 August

If you want an exploration of emotional honesty, this show is for you. It is another of this year's crop of shows presenting comedy as some kind of counselling session. Bennett is intelligent and charismatic and so can hold his audience through a disparate collection of tales from his life.

Somehow we seem to be learning more about Gareth (chosen from the audience) than we do about Alexander. In the last section Bennett gets more personal with inappropriate gifts, domestic violence and the allure of transvestite women. I leave entirely unsure why the songs were there. But they were. Kate Copstick