10. Nish Kumar: Your Power, Your Control
A set delivering all the livid topical comedy we expect from the Mash Report man and more, as Kumar explored the implications (for the state of the nation, for his mental health) of the moment when his anti-colonial, anti-Brexit jokes at a posh charity gig saw him pelted with bread rolls. As funny as ever but soul-searching too. Read the full review
9. Lara Ricote: GRL/LATNX/DEF
This fringe debut by the Mexican-American comic, and reigning Funny Women champ, waltzed off with the Edinburgh festival’s best newcomer gong. The acclaim was well deserved by a show, GRL/LATNX/DEF, that both dined out on Ricote’s multi-layered identity and complicated it in lots of fascinating and funny ways. Read the full review
8. Sami Abu Wardeh: Bedu
Character comedy and clown rolled into one, as Abu Wardeh riffs on the tale of a Palestinian refugee’s journey to the UK. Giralomo the movement guru, Rodrigo the sleazy guitarist and an over-eager kids’ ninja coach all star in a cruise ship antic that combines the uproarious and ridiculous with intriguing hints of something more substantial. Read the full review
7. Chloe Petts: Transience
Equanimity and good humour aren’t standout features of the discourse around gender. Props to Chloe Petts, then, whose delayed solo debut relates her own life lived as “the man I always wanted to be” with quiet conviction, nuance and an always amusing sense of her own (and the rest of our) ridiculousness. Read the full review
6. Tarot: Cautionary Tales
“Sketch will never die,” runs the slightly desperate refrain in this latest offering from Ed Easton, Kath Hughes and Adam Drake: a fantastically wild and inappropriate hour of occult-tinged team comedy. An audience member is asked to tally every single laugh in the show. Suffice to say, they’re kept very busy. Read the full review
5. Frankie Thompson: Catts
Now and then a show comes along that creates its own theatrical language and finds new ways of making us laugh. Frankie Thompson’s Catts was one such performance, a mental-health-coping mechanism wrapped in a DIY compendium of cat videos and delivered by a keep-fit clown on a treadmill. Wonderfully, confoundingly funny – and more besides. Read the full review
4. Jordan Gray: Is It a Bird?
The Edinburgh fringe is where to go for those “a star is born” moments. And no one present at Is It a Bird? could doubt that that’s exactly what they were witnessing. Addressing transgenderism, culture wars, clickbait, superheroes and more, this irrepressible musical comedy hour will be cited in “I was there” anecdotes for years to come. Read the full review
3. Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees
Taking an innocuous subject and overthinking it is a fine comic tradition. I can recall no funnier nor more extreme example than this Off-Broadway smash that investigates – from every conceivable angle – the art of the blowjob. Part memoir, part spoof academic treatise, Get on Your Knees took its audiences to dizzy heights of comic arousal. Read the full review
2. Kim Noble: Lullaby for Scavengers
Some will question whether it’s comedy at all. Maybe it’s too disturbing, unethical, too altogether strange for that? But I laughed – and recoiled, and teared up – plenty at Lullaby for Scavengers, another extraordinary multimedia record of Kim Noble’s life adrift among dying relatives, consumer capitalism and the wildlife of nocturnal London. Read the full review
1. Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares?!
Today’s most thrilling comedy is being made by the social media generation, now splaying their curated, confused identities, their selfie-awareness, fragility – and their sophisticated self-irony – across the stage. No one does that better than 24-year-old Leo Reich, whose debut announced the arrival of a talent you couldn’t take your eyes off. Preening, narcissistic and brittle, Reich’s persona could be read as a satire on the Gen Z ego run amok. But with his interchangeable opinions, his low-level terror that he’s not signalling his virtue loudly enough, and with the world and his prospects collapsing around him, you can’t help but love him too – and laugh at him, a lot. Read the full review
