Fringe comedy reviews: Demi Adejuyigbe Sells Out | Joseph Morpurgo: Highlander 70 | Harriet Richardson: Creep | Jack Brookmyre: Impressionable | Making Love with David Magidoff

Demi Adejuyigbe Sells Out | Sela Shiloni

COMEDY

Demi Adejuyigbe Sells Out ★★★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 30 August

There’s a charmingly lo-fi quality to this new collection of songs, bits and frothy silliness from Demi Adejuyigbe. His AI robot looks suspiciously like a couple of cardboard boxes covered in tin foil. His animations are decidedly sketchy and his songs steal heavily and deliberately from other sources.

The American, who was nominated for Best Newcomer in 2024, has decided to spend as little money as possible on his Fringe show, which entails looking for big name sponsors and touting for other, more lucrative work in showbusiness.

Demi runs ads for a Canadian T Shirt company, auditions to become a non-sexist James Bond and tries to write a Christmas hit that will ensure he never has to work again. He does magic tricks, asks an audience member to rate his performance by hurling a tomato and has a series of jokes that really should have been a tweet. There’s even a lovely but pointless sad song, 45 minutes in, as per Edinburgh Fringe show convention.

The highlight, for me, is his theme song for a new cartoon Dracula, based on Timothee Chalamet, which becomes more and more ludicrous when guided by a series of emails from television executives.

Behind the home-made aesthetics, this is a show bursting with ideas and full of refreshingly leftfield frivolity. His subtle anti-capitalist, pro-creativity message will creep up and ambush you – even when you’re laughing yourself silly. In his one man sketch show Adejuyigbe plays guitar, electric guitar, keyboard. He also controls the robot comic, lines up the sound cues and sometimes mimes along to subtitles. But the comic doesn’t disappear behind the technology, or the music. His quiet cheeky confidence woos the audience until we are completely won over and dying to see his next batshit scheme for attracting fame and fortune. Claire Smith

COMEDY

Joseph Morpurgo: Highlander 70 ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

Nine years after his last Fringe, Joseph Morpurgo is back with another found artefact, folk art collage, a cut-and-paste collision of gags that befits the label Morpurgian, with nothing else quite like it in the current comedy firmament. Highlander 70 is a similar but more accessible and less sinister companion piece to his 2014 warping of small town America, Odessa. More panoramic in scope, it has the hormonal momentum of adolescent rite of passage, with all the action taking place on a single day.

From a precious car boot sale find of an impossibly full and varied US high school yearbook from 1970, Morpurgo has reverse engineered an alternative life for its owner, one David Moon. Taking the stereotypes of jocks, nerds and hard-arse principal, and further distorting them from reality, the narrative tracks the diffident Moon as he prepares a valedictorian speech for Highlander Academy on the final day of school, while planning to tell his crush how he feels about her. Truly, the source material is a trove of rich, photographic nostalgia that Morpurgo finds the inexplicable in, applying a modern eye and savage edit to meanings lost in time, manipulating Moon as if he were a paper puppet.

Yet while the piece is necessarily audiovisual heavy, an intricate patchwork of cues and rudimentary animation, such a description doesn't reflect the variety of jokes Morpurgo crams into the hour. Starkly face-painted, the comic is always in motion, cycling through a multitude of characters, drawing on his considerable improv skills to inveigle the audience into scenes, even blowing his contained tale up beyond the fourth wall to the Pleasance Courtyard outside. Some of Morpurgo's ambivalent darkness has been shed as he permits a brief admission of his own teenage vulnerability. But the youthful hopes and dreams he's stripped for freakish parts haven't fully surrendered their endearing optimism either. Jay Richardson

Enjoying The Scotsman's coverage of the Edinburgh festivals? For just £2 a month you can get unlimited access to scotsman.com plus 2-for-1 Fringe tickets. For details visit www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

COMEDY

Harriet Richardson: Creep ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

Obviously, the top line takeaway from performance artist Harriet Richardson's venture into stand-up is how she was sleazily pursued by a high-profile comedian for sex. And how his management, accustomed to this pattern of behaviour, sought to shut the situation down. But they reckoned without the all-in Richardson's own toxically obsessive tendencies and dedication to her art, which she lays bares here with roguish charm and a promise of absolute honesty and authenticity, an “allegedly” caveat notwithstanding.

The biggest breadcrumb that she drops is that the comic is a former Taskmaster contestant. But there are others as she dances around exposing his identity. The morality of this thoroughly modern, digitally-enabled tale is a little grubby on both sides and costs Richardson a considerable amount as she's made to confront her performative compulsion. It all began so relatively wholesomely too, with her embarking upon a series of 100 brief virtual dates, interacting with a broad spectrum of individuals, most on the harmless side of eccentric. However, the notoriety and press coverage that this garnered won her access to Raya, the celebrity dating app. And so began a remote, clandestine game of cat and mouse, blurring the lines of art, comedy, propriety and privacy as Richardson wrestled with the power of celebrity and male entitlement.

She reveals her attraction to older men, by compelling a vicar and a wonderfully dedicated, incredibly named private investigator to her cause. And she gets huge laughs from the online reactions her art provokes, sharing socially revealing, hilarious dialogue between her supporters and detractors. The voyeuristic aspect and wrong 'un hunt of Creep is the draw. But she has a nose for the narrative, a real eye for its humorous elements and a saved folder for the dick pics. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Jack Brookmyre: Impressionable ★★★

The Stand Comedy Club 3 & 4 (Venue 12) until 30 August

At a youthful 26, and younger-looking even than that, you wouldn't call bespectacled, casting ratified “gawky wee guy” Jack Brookmyre fashionable. His denim waistcoat is emblazoned with the badges of his favourite death metal bands. And, having surprisingly snuck his way into the LGBTQ+ community, the Glaswegian comic is, as he sadly and wittily reflects, the only tenuous form of queer that it's still acceptable to bully. Most anachronistically though, Brookmyre is an impressionist when it's becoming a dying art, with audiences so disseminated across culture, with fewer and fewer shared references. So he chiefly clings to the mainstream classics, Donald Trump, David Attenborough and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, in his fitfully entertaining debut hour.

Brookmyre's voices are his strongest suit and he's capable of deploying them inventively, as when he imagines Gollum's schizophrenic contributions to Glasgow's chaotic city planning. Or brute effectively in his aligning of Trump with Hitler. There's rather too much theorising about communication, part of the philosophy graduate's general weakness in being too wordy in his setups. But he has his persona down pat, appreciating how his character both departs from and reinforces the metaller stereotype, while amusingly sharing his fish-out-of water standing among his older former co-workers and the drunken Polish. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Making Love with David Magidoff ★★★

Assembly George Square (Venue 17) until 23 August

During every night of this run, the affable David Magidoff (who plays a cop in Dexter) chats to a celebrity about a real love story from their life, and then his team of Emmy Award-winners and Grammy-nominated improvisers make a musical show about what they’ve just heard.

On this night, Tim Burgess from The Charlatans is in the hot seat, and he kicks off with a couple of songs that make fans swoon. And then, with the understated charm he’s known for, shares the story of how he got together with his partner, Geneva Jacuzzi (you’d be forgiven for thinking her name was conjured by improv but she’s real).

The final bit – the improv – doesn’t always hit the mark, but it’s a fun exercise and a warm atmosphere. And improv shows, of course, will be different each time.

Past guests have included Travis’s Fran Healy and comics Rosie Jones and Phil Wang. Coming up are last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award winner (newcomer) and SNL UK comic Ayoade Bamgboye, Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats star Kiell Smith-Bynoe, stand-up Fatiha El-Ghorri (19-21 Aug) and drag star Reuben Kaye (23 August). Ashley Davies

The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today

Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source

Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here