Fringe comedy reviews: Madeleine Brettingham | Pierre Novellie | Those People | Paddy Young | Tom Ballard

Madeleine Brettingham | Steve Ullathorne

Madeleine Brettingham: Legend ★ ★ ★ ★

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) until 30 August

Seasoned comedy writer Madeleine Brettingham is a late convert to stand-up. But with this swaggeringly confident and clinically executed debut hour, last year's So You Think You're Funny? winner reiterates that she's an absolute killer on stage. Raised in a pub by a single, alcoholic father, she's witheringly cutting and mockingly unsympathetic towards blokeish, self-destructive behaviour, questioning why we still validate it as a society. But she's also aware that she's absorbed a fair bit of it herself through hostelry osmosis, defining herself as a “female geezer”.

That's reflected in her choice of men, the weak betas she preys upon at a park run, as she oscillates between identifying with and denouncing toxic traits. Brettingham's also highly class-conscious too, having left her working-class upbringing in Bournemouth and ascended to the heady spires of Cambridge University, sharpening her insider-outsider observational acumen even as her chippy resentment was stoked.

With her competitive, writers room training evident, Brettingham's set is lean and punchy, with precious little fat on the setups and nary a word wasted. And beyond a playful, Artful Dodger click of her heels to spoof any sense of her trying to ingratiate with the crowd, her high status front is locked and impregnable, the performance skills and stagecraft stridently in place too.

Regardless of her scornful brutality and satirical inclination to slaughter any sacred cow, you're drawn to her brazen cheek, the legendary self-assurance of it. All the while, her late dad's failings are more than simply a jumping off point for social commentary on the masculinity crisis. She hilariously memorialises him in a way that's not mawkish, a little manipulative granted, yet appropriate to the way he lived, while also finding room to acknowledge her own achievement in carving a (more-or-less) different destiny. Jay Richardson

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Pierre Novellie: Okay, One More Then Bedtime ★ ★ ★ ★

Monkey Barrel 3 at Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 515)

Something is ailing Pierre Novellie. He’s realised he’s part of the last generation of comics who started before the internet. Now he’s drowning in a sea of content. He doesn’t want to be content. He doesn’t know what he wants any more.

It’s odd because our bear-like South African hero has just got married but he doesn’t seem to be full of the joys. Perhaps it’s because he’s got hitched that he’s becoming frustrated with the life of a touring comic. The hotels, the travel, the diminishing returns. I remember there was a sizeable chunk of hotel material in his last show.

This story centres around a trip to Japan, his honeymoon, when he encounters perfect order, politeness and consideration for the first time – and wonders if this is what it feels like to live in the non-autistic world.

Novellie is a master writer, storyteller and raconteur. He fills the room with great big roaring laughs with reliable certainty.

Like a lot of comics Novellie only feels truly at home when he’s on the stage. But it’s easy to forget how tough this life can be and what sacrifices it entails. Claire Smith

Those People ★ ★ ★ ★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

In this queer, late-night ride-or-die romp of an hour, Those People begin with a car crash and end with an epic reconciliation. Lara Ciulli and Riana White are an attuned but eager-to-project friction duo, grinding the comedic against the dramatic, blurring the platonic with the romantic and channelling the dynamically sexual through the balletically poised and clownishly daft. Intermittently, both have, and are on, each other's backs throughout this fun, multi-layered and physically expressive production, literally so in the supportive but unnerving way that they slink on stage.

Examining couples, with their own painful autobiographies splayed inbetween fictional scenarios, the key sagas are White's testy relationship with her mother, played by Ciulli, and Ciulli's difficult sundering from her ex-boyfriend, played by White, who in reality helped Ciulli realise that she was gay. Confused? To further stoke tensions and ratchet up the laughs, both have penned letters seeking a degree of reconciliation with their estranged significant others, that the other delivers with brute, performative insensitivity, the future of the friendship and the act portrayed as at stake.

Mix in a viscerally silly Wuthering Heights spoof and an erotically charged evening evacuated of all sexiness by an unlikely form of freshening up and it's a heady spectacle. Two young women prancing about a sweatbox venue in their underwear, but with pants themselves a flashpoint of contention and a costume deployed with perverse wrongness.

As with many classic double acts, Ciulli and White's simmering annoyance with each other is the subtext of almost everything. Yet beneath that seems a genuinely loving bond. And beyond it a mainstream-challenging, sapphic dynamic of female performers being uproariously stupid, which even the terrible sightlines in their room can't inhibit. My advice would be don't sit at the back as you'll wreck your neck craning to watch. Jay Richardson

Paddy Young: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? ★ ★ ★ ★

Monkey Barrel Comedy @ Cabaret Voltaire (Venue 338) until 16 August

This is the way to do it. Paddy Young, star of SNL UK Weekend Update starts his show with the sort of bad taste topical gag that once got Norm Macdonald fired.

I was fascinated to see how Young would deal with the sudden expansion of his demographic. Like all the young stars of UK Saturday Night Live he’s attracting massive attention – and has already had to put on several extra shows.

But Young’s previous shows have been themed around how desperately miserable he is. How is he going to cope now he’s a success? Reader, he’s taken it as a challenge. This is a demented doomscroll of an autobiographical show. Young is determined to prove he’s still the most unfortunate man on earth. He’s single, he’s desperate, he wets the bed. He wants to die.

Young’s misery is so intense it is utterly ludicrous. But even as he talks about his sadness and distress he roams around the stage doling out perfectly honed zingers like a comedy gunslinger.

For Young the extra show is an absolute gift. Finding himself with some pensioners in a cellar at lunchtime is the perfect place to prove his point.

Young fires out brilliant off-the-cuff crowd work about big tvs and comfortable sneakers – and realises with a giant sigh, that the retired ad executive on the front row is never going to take up his beat-boxing challenge.

The audience loves him. Young is relaxed, confident and in control. And listening to his outrageous litany of misery is very, very funny. We all get miserable sometimes. And we’re all struggling with the cost of living. Thank goodness Paddy Young gives us all the chance to have a great big hearty laugh about it all. Human suffering has never been so much fun. Claire Smith

READ MORE: My Festival: Felicity Ward

Tom Ballard: Be Funny Challenge (Impossible) ★ ★ ★

O’Neill’s (The Tron) at Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 51) until 30 August

There’s something very irritating about having to review a show where the performer keeps banging on about reviews. How can I enjoy the show and write about it when Tom Ballard keeps flashing up powerpoints of his previous reviews and demonstrating what terrible writers all the reviewers are. We’re tired Tom. Sometimes we say silly things.

It’s a shame because I really do like Tom Ballard. He’s bouncy, loveable and in your face and he won’t stop talking about politics even if it’s unfashionable.

There are some really big laughs in the first half of the show, when Ballard tells how he was cancelled by the Australian press for doing a Nazi salute on stage. Guess what? It was all a big misunderstanding.

It’s tough to be targeted unfairly by the press. Just ask Amanda Knox. But conflating political opinion with lukewarm reviews for your comedy shows is what philosophers call a category mistake.

He has some great stuff about growing up gay and some excellent hard-hitting thoughts on Israel, Palestine and the rise of antisemitism. But yelling THREE STARS, THREE STARS, THREE STARS, THREE STARS throughout a comedy show just gets very annoying. It’s hard to remember anything else. Claire Smith

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