Fringe Comedy reviews: Emma Holland | Aalex Mandel-Dallal | Tom Neenan | Alan Jay | Lizzy Hoo

Emma Holland: The Dog Dies at the Start | Contributed

Emma Holland: The Dog Dies at the Start ★ ★ ★ ★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 30 August

Pretty much all of the drama in Emma Holland's latest superb show is relayed in the opening minute, as the Australian recalls how her beloved greyhound passed away unexpectedly just before Christmas 2024. Overwhelmed with grief in her Brisbane apartment, which immediately felt bigger and emptier, she and her husband decamped to her parents' place nearby. And slowly, she set about trying to piece herself back together through unremarkable daily rituals, initially with her loved ones, then on her own.

Although Holland speaks touchingly of her dog and conveys the debilitating stress his loss provoked in her, this is a far-from-sad hour, with the comic having accepted the challenge of proving her resilience with alacrity.

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It helps that she's a high-achieving daftie, vaingloriously sharing her excellent school results with protestations that it was a mistake. But she also delights in her mother's instinctive parochialism, which could be interpreted as civic pride but which the snooty comic looks down upon, bolstering her argument with carefully plotted visual evidence.

A mother-daughter shopping excursion failed to rouse her from her funk, with Holland outraged at the price of a tacky crystal figurine. And her efforts to mute her perturbed brain in a floatation tank is scuppered by an insensitive spa employee. Relaying her stumbling healing journey with a series of unexpected visual gags and surprise set pieces, there's a compelling dual address from the sad, irritable Holland of the past and the more whimsical jester of the present.

And this temporal slippage ensures that the more-or-less chronological narrative never seems predictable, with abundant gags planted for later pay-off. Unlike a certain British political figure that Holland resurrects with waggish impunity, there's no full circle, happy revival in the tale either, simply a reiteration that tragedy requires more than time to equal comedy. Jay Richardson

Aalex Mandel-Dallal: Where Was I? ★ ★ ★

Hoots @ Nicolson Square (Venue 63) until 30 August

Aalex Mandel-Dallal's a real kook, driven to perform but rattling with anxieties and insecurities. Favouring exposition in song form, the stand-up tunefully adapts garage chart hits to reflect upon her life, rare moments of controlled assurance in an otherwise excitable delivery. She also employs an unfolded plastic case full of mementoes and other props, aide mémoires that range from the dehumidifier that made her flat bearable enough to warrant its own musical number, to photos of her Jewish-German grandmother and Jewish-Iraqi grandmother.

Their example and suffering is something that she carries close to her heart, even if she can't recall which side of her chest it's on. In a loving relationship with her Irish fiancé, despite his stubborn insistence that she watches Lord of the Rings, her initial, wired nerviness is largely attributable to her worries about procreation, rooted in the egg freezing procedure that she's recently undergone.

But as she recounts her difficult experience of going travelling, it's fully apparent that the neurotic comic has a complex interplay of trauma that requires much more than this patchy but generally appealing debut hour to unpack. Jay Richardson

Tom Neenan: Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan ★ ★ ★

Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) until 30 August

An understatedly charming story this from former head scribe for The Mash Report and artist Tom Neenan. Hinging on a commission the comic took to paint a rather difficult pensioner, it's a tale suffused with warmth and wit about how we see ourselves, venturing into some tough territory but unfolding with a high gag count.

Although painting professionally is a relatively recent side hustle for Neenan, he's had artistic pretensions for much longer, evidenced by his outlandish, adolescent reinterpretation of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch and an absurdly high-concept, politically incorrect feature film he made when he was too young to know better. Much more pressing for him in the recent past however, given his invite to a friend's wedding abroad, is his difficult relationship with food.

He refrains from sharing too many details, much more comfortable cracking lines with writerly panache and a pleasing, accessible breadth of culture, when perhaps he could have opened up more vulnerably and let the show off its guardrails. Still, Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan ties together neatly and arrives at a tender resolution. Jay Richardson

Alan Jay: Hell Hath No Humour Like a Gayboy Scorned ★ ★ ★

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 30 August

Even by the general standards of stand-up, Alan Jay is playing with a full deck of childhood trauma and mental and physical issues, so he can be forgiven for his brutally dark sense of humour, presented completely in the wrong time slot of early evening. As a gay man from Castlemilk, he's transgressing boundaries just for being, and getting, out, whilst offering a few postcards from the underclass to any middle-class poverty tourists at the Edinburgh Fringe.

As the son of hard drug addicts raised chaotically he's done incredibly well to outwardly reject bitterness, the open, enquiring mind he's acquired from the time he spent in Asia and his current status as a 33-year-old mature student a useful step in his efforts to reclaim his narrative.

Not that there haven't been bumps along the way in recent times either, as he speaks of a toxic, mixed-race relationship. And while some of his gags are wince-inducingly penetrating, still others are just punishingly crude, the excited overstep of a relatively new performer. Still he's clearly got considerable potential, with a mischievous cheek, daring in his writing and that unenviable backstory to further exploit. Jay Richardson

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Lizzy Hoo – Says Hoo? ★ ★ ★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 30 August

Confounding all expectations of her, the wily Lizzy Hoo is an unvarnished and bracingly outspoken type, a seasoned performer in Australia who's grabbing her Fringe debut by the scruff of the neck, berating her audience for being too sensitive. Sex, sport and affluence-positive, she flaunts her success with cheerful nonchalance, overturning stereotypes, even while she's a huge cheerleader for Asian women's dominance of golf.

Like her entrepreneurial Chinese-Malaysian father, Hoo isn't above profiting from her ethno-religious background if people choose to make assumptions. Though she tends to have them misinterpreting her relationship with her white Irish mother. Blessed with a crazy family whose love language is, she maintains, low-level bullying, she's got a brother who's more famous than her in certain circles, albeit with the absolute dodgiest of professional wheezes: flogging a product that absolutely no woman has ever desired.

Closing with the utterly contemporary story of a date and sexual hook-up that went nowhere initially, except to the confidences of Hoo's friends, it's a slightly grubby, ethically murky tale that no-one emerges from with any great credit. But the comic probably comes out just ahead on points. And there's prurient appeal in hearing her share it now far and wide. Jay Richardson

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