Edinburgh’s Hogmanay review: Ho Ho Hogmanay, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh

In spite of sharing a bill with some seasoned performers, Larry Dean turned out to be the crowd-pleasing hit of this Hogmanay comedy show, writes Jay Richardson

Ho Ho Hogmanay, Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh ***

A canny addition to Edinburgh's new year celebrations, the inaugural Ho Ho Hogmanay comedy night could boast three bona fide Scottish headliners, plus Emmanuel Sonubi hosting, the Londoner having significantly boosted his profile at the Fringe in recent years with successive Edinburgh Comedy Award nominations. A former bouncer, he knows how to read a room and raised energy levels by badgering young men in the front rows into escalating displays of applause for the acts, a route one approach that fostered a warm, attentive atmosphere.

Admirably choosing a Yuletide and local flavour for her set, Susie McCabe's opening Christmas gripes perhaps weren't as polished as her usual standard of anecdote. Yet she successfully conveyed the terror of attending the nativities of no less than 12 godchildren. More compelling was her account of her newly wedded stay at the nearby Balmoral Hotel, playing up her working-class unworldliness encountering such luxury, with her flabbergasted incredulity remaining just the right side of faux-naivety.

Larry Dean

Slightly unfortunately, she finished on a developing routine about her wife's insistence that she might be autistic, echoing the next act, Larry Dean, whose boyfriends have made similar diagnoses of him. Putting two gay, Catholic comics with the same potential neurodiversity adjacent wasn't perhaps the shrewdest programming. And it reinforced straight, white, middle-aged closing act Fred MacAulay's tongue-in-cheek claim to be the “diversity” booking. Happily, McCabe and Dean are such strikingly distinctive performers that it was less of an issue than it could have been, with the latter's cartoonishly expressive act outs, wired oddness and irrepressible cheekiness making him the crowd-pleasing hit of the evening.

Up last, MacAulay delivered his usual waggish example of retaining your mischievousness even as your faculties fail, seeking out foreign audience members to educate them on the quirks of Scottish culture and politics. Though possibly a little too mean on a couple of American students, closing the night on a bit of an off-note, his protestations about the wider social impact of pubic hair falling out of fashion is a terrifically daft bit of feigned horror.