Fringe comedy reviews: Anna Leong Brophy: Born Sexy Yesterday | Sean Morley: Backchannel | Jess Carrivick: For Your Consideration | Francisco de Nata | Will BF: Moon Team IIIV | Alice Fraser: Oh Man!

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COMEDY

Anna Leong Brophy: Born Sexy Yesterday ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

Part Pygmalion-esque satire, part spoof of any number of boneheaded Hollywood movies with superficial female leads, Anna Leong Brophy's solo Fringe debut is a multi-faceted gem. Best known as one half of sketch duo Egg, she hatches from one such weirdly glowing orb, a hybrid figure of naïve alien baby sex robot. Latching onto the first man she finds and acquiring the name Jacket, she accumulates knowledge at a dizzying rate yet settles into a trad wife life of domestic and sexual servitude, before belatedly discovering her origins, breaking her programming and setting off in pursuit of greater fulfilment.

Exploring the limited options open to her, both as a woman and an actor in an industry that prioritises the male gaze and doesn't exactly cater for the female ageing process, Leong Brophy despairingly tries on various archetypes for size, displaying commendable comic versatility - with a bonnet period piece that struggles to pass the Bechdel Test a highlight. Temporarily breaking character to quiz the audience about the most popular films of all time and women's marginalised roles within them, her point-making isn't subtle but it's starkly effective. Berating a God-like screenwriter for the lip service he pays to female empowerment, she also delivers a very funny encapsulation of one of the most cliched male roles, all the while fuming at the wide array of parts that Leonardo DiCaprio gets presented with. Her Chinese heritage seems to offer her an unlikely route to enlightenment but with provocative use of props she's still left floundering for answers.

Although driven by her spirited, eclectic performance and unsuppressed anger and disenfranchisement, Leong Brophy's packed a vast number of gags into a dense, multi-act script, producing a fiercely funny, feminist howl for recognition. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Sean Morley: Backchannel ★★★★

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Niddry Street) (Venue 80) until 30 August

Daringly playful with the form of stand-up, Sean Morley is deconstructing it even as he exploits it. Easy to recommend yet difficult to describe, lest too much is spoiled, Backchannel focuses on crowd work and the relationship between audience and performer. Internet-enabled with a strong interactive element, it questions the extent of the comic's control over his narrative. As we enter the room, two screens carry a script, promising Morley's “first ever fully improvised show”, a contradiction from the get-go. Yet the script also reveals that something terrible is going to happen to Morley, as well as the audience's response.

Highlighting the show's predetermination, implicating the crowd in the rituals of stand-up, it's the beginning of a series of set-pieces where Morley is forever asserting his authority, while undermining it. This isn't, he's at pains to stress, one of those cerebral comedy shows where those experiencing it get to smugly pat themselves on the back for being into it, yet rarely laugh. It is a succession of twists and surprises that's visceral and immediate in the responses it provokes, invariably sustained hilarity with each establishing its own momentum.

Alternately wheedling, berating and simply leaving the crowd to their own devices, with his show's centrepiece Morley has created a ferociously addictive tool to engage with, allowing a giddy mob rule to establish itself, even as individuals seize the opportunity for the spotlight. A ludicrously committed and expensive endeavour to try to prove a point about crowd work from stand-up luminary Daniel Kitson, it's wonderfully effective, with Morley stepping back to admire the fruits of his calculating handiwork. Hugely enjoyable. Jay Richardson

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COMEDY

Jess Carrivick: For Your Consideration ★★★

Gilded Balloon Teviot (Venue 14) until 30 August

Interspersing the childhood home videos that Jess Carrivick made with her brother Jack at the turn of the Millennium with a series of clownish characters, the celluloid-soaked For Your Consideration is a giddy romp through film that delights in parody but also explores family through the lens of the family business. With characters crossing over but standing apart, the youthful naivete of the Carrivick siblings' eagerness to shoot themselves gives way to the final performance of an ageing showbusiness lag, Cassandra, a jazz singer from Hollywood's golden age, indiscreet and spilling the tea from the set of The Wizard of Oz. There's also a school mum, bizarrely averse to water, whose concerns about her child's performance in the school's production are distinctly secondary to name-dropping her relationship with British comedy royalty. Meanwhile, a lighthouse keeper guards a terrible secret, an unlikely dancer is encouraged to fly by an even unlikelier source and sisterly ushers frame the piece with attendant interaction with the crowd. Superficially silly, there is though, a strong personal thread that's gently teased out and stands as an admonishment of the screen's powers that be overlooking comedy for critical appreciation for the umpteenth time. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Francisco de Nata ★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 30 August

Featuring one of the best costumes at the Fringe, a beautiful assemblage of cardboard and cheekily exposed rear end, this undemanding, almost entirely non-verbal clown show doesn't pull up any trees but is happy to graze in the Serengeti of gentle audience interaction. Resplendent in yellow, de Nata looms into view, a giraffe in a g-string, engaging the crowd with the easy grace of an elegant herbivore, right up until we misinterpret his mimed instructions, whereupon he gets more cartoonishly animated. Although scenarios initially appear fairly random, the application of his giraffe's blue tongue notwithstanding, there gradually emerges a narrative of de Nata painting his beloved Portuguese grandmother's ceiling, an act of devotion that prompts some panic but yields an unlikely romantic storyline, a happy ending that the majority of the crowd get inveigled into. Chucklesome throughout with occasional longueurs, there are some entertaining bits of business. But the show never scales the heights its long-necked star threatens to, relying on sentimentality to reach a satisfactory feeling of pay-off. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Will BF: Moon Team IIIV ★★★

Underbelly, Cowgate (Venue 61) until 30 August

If Mel Brooks can bring Spaceballs back for a sequel, then by God, the force of frivolity that is Will BF is going to have some fun with Star Wars first. Less a spoof of George Lucas' overblown space opera than a denunciation of the folly of its endless sequels, prequels and spin-offs, Moon Team IIIV is a well-oiled combination of BF dashing about in live action interspersed with pre-recorded video inserts, of various talking heads (all played by BF), lamenting a fictional film that ought never to have been made but has acquired considerable notoriety in the wider universe that BF has concocted. Mocking the clunky reverse engineering of prequels via exploration of the principal characters' origin stories, he makes a virtue of this being a solo show by assembling his sidekicks from the most rudimentary of props, affixed to his person, chief amongst them a fish that disturbingly swells in size with each appearance. The satire on the soulless movie business is pretty broad. But it's effective in skewering its targets, with the highlight a thinly disguised Orson Welles trading in his last shreds of dignity in alcohol adverts and children's franchises, his unfortunate passing leading to some unscrupulous editing. Incorporating a daft, interactive run through of the philosophical trolley problem no less, it's a quirky, knockabout and consistently amusing hour. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Alice Fraser: Oh Man! ★★

O’Neil’s (The Tron) at Monkey Barrel (Venue 51)

Alice Fraser sets out to quantify masculinity using the manosphere’s own ludicrous metrics in this densely written hour that raises many fascinating ideas about the (relatively) nascent world of men’s mental health awareness versus big tech’s determination to push its own agenda into their heads, bodies and pants.

The bones of a wonderful show are inside Oh Man! but laughs are frustratingly out of reach. It feels too scripted and congested, relying too often on repeated puns and multimedia that doesn’t always earn its place. Sadly, it doesn’t match the standard we’re used to from this intelligent and experienced stand-up, but I’d definitely love to read more of her findings. Ashley Davies

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