Fringe comedy reviews: Otto & Astrid: The Stages Tour | Ahir Shah: Golden | Dom McGovern: Prize Hog | Tom Little in his Comfort Zone | BIRDS: Alex Hines and Sarah Stafford | Viggo Venn: Only One

Otto & Astrid | Image: contributed

COMEDY

Otto & Astrid: The Stages Tour ★★★★

Upstairs at Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) until 30 August

Our favourite punk brother and sister Otto and Astrid are back at the Fringe, after becoming TikTok darlings with songs like I Want To Be Your Kitten and Tasty Snacks.

Otto and Astrid, also known as Die Roten Punkte, come on to the sounds of Iggy Pop’s I Wanna Be Your Dog. It’s a hard act to follow, but this pair of comedy, punk, musician clowns keep up the intensity.

Astrid, on the drums, is dressed in a black and red ensemble that gives Mary Queen of Scots, Lene Lovich and Meg White. She’s a confident sexy minx, with definite dominatrix vibes.

Brother Otto, with white face, smeared red lips and blue-black Iggy style fringe, and impossibly sad eyes, plays electric guitar, and keyboard.

Astrid, three years older, is most definitely the leader and there’s a lot of petulant squabbles over song choices and how much talking there should be. Otto’s trauma is always bubbling below the surface and he inserts his own peculiar experimental compositions whenever he gets the chance.

It’s an extraordinary mixture of live gig, clown show and stand up, with Otto and Astrid stuck in a perpetual adolescence, halfway between children and adults.

Astrid overflows with abundant sexuality, while Otto is overburdened with emotion. But somehow, despite the tension and the trauma, the gig goes ahead and it’s a great one.

Soon the audience are bouncing in their seats, making kitten gestures and jumping up to catch the cheesy snacks being hurled from the stage. There’s laughs, thrills, excitement and some thumping tunes, and we all have a really excellent time.

After the show the crowd rushes to buy merch, and some of the biggest stars of the Australian comedy scene are hanging round the stage door, smoking sneaky fags and proudly sporting kitten jumpers. Comedy Rock’n’Roll, Baby. Claire Smith

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COMEDY

Ahir Shah: Golden ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August and McEwan Hall at Underbelly Bristo Square (Venue 302) 21 August

Ahir Shah, who won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2023 for his exceptional show, Ends, returns with an astutely written contemplation of his life, love and responsibilities.

He’s now what Gujuratis call a “grihastha”, which broadly means “householder”; he’s swapped his life savings for a lifetime of debt (there’s a clue in the Latin translation of “mortgage”).

There’s been a death in the family, and his Indian parents, who sacrificed so much for him, have had a horrible and expensive-to-fix incident in their own home.

Shah’s body is responding badly – very badly indeed – to stress, and there are some moments that are so candid and vulnerable you feel you’re intruding upon pain that’s too chronic to be in the public domain just yet.

Although he doesn’t refer to it in the show, the name of this show comes from The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem about decay, divinity and divinity.

It’s a beautifully paced hour with countless cleverly written jokes, and there’s no denying Shah’s expertise on stage, but the sadness and worry at its heart make it low on laughs. And although we are comforted to an extent by glimmers of optimism stemming from a powerful connubial love, one is left with a visceral response to the weight of pressure on Shah. Ashley Davies

COMEDY

Dom McGovern: Prize Hog ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

A candid, confessional hour of self-basting stand-up, Dom McGovern's Fringe debut is a concerted exploration of shame. The debonair gay comic has the arch wit and flashing cheek to be plain-speaking, snippy or gushing, about physical appearances while retaining his smooth, garrulous charm. Raised Catholic, and with a considerable accompanying shame, he recounts how he developed bulimia, his monitoring of calories and concern for his physicality rather less narcissistic than it initially seems.

Brutally funny on the supposed arrogance of body dysmorphia and in his shallowness about the weight loss benefits of extreme illness, McGovern is by turns sage with hindsight and ignorant in the recreated moment, treading more heavily than he might have liked as the sole man in his eating disorder therapy group. Suitably horrified about food messaging he absorbed in adolescence from the likes of Kate Moss and Gillian McKeith, he's no smug, fully cured success story however. Sympathetic to fellow sufferers and his younger self, he remains vulnerably sensitive, a holiday he took to Brazil bringing out the best and worst in him. Ultimately, Prize Hog is more than a straightforward introductory show, it's a generally confident statement of a life more-or-less reclaimed. Jay Richardson

COMEDY

Tom Little in his Comfort Zone ★★★

Voodoo Rooms (Venue 68b) until 30 August

To all intents and purposes, this is a portrait of an undernourished man having a nervous breakdown right in front of us. Tom, however, assures us he is fine. Were there an award for the greatest number of words in an hour, there is no one to touch him. Include the repetitions, the ums and the ers, and this is world record stuff. But there are laughs here, coming at us from many angles. Oddly, part of this Niagara of words concerns man's inability to communicate, while other parts involve Britpop (traumatising for Jarvis Cocker fans) while yet another examines the fraught matter of an Englishman pronouncing Welsh names. I should warn you that this is something of a shaggy dog story, and by the punchline we are all utterly exhausted. Things get rightly political with Peter Rabbit, but not for long.

One wonderful effect of the Little word torrent is how marvellously things escalate. We go from an apology for checking his watch to the end of the world in under a minute and from crisps to fantasies of killing his parents in only slightly longer. This is Tom "in his comfort zone". I don't think I could cope seeing him out of it. Kate Copstick

COMEDY

BIRDS: Alex Hines and Sarah Stafford ★★★

Assembly George Square (Venue 8) until 30 August

Shayna Randolph and Beverley Santos are two grating monstrosities, the insufferable housewives of Oz in their loud kaftans, fancy mules and beehive wigs last seen at the Grand Ole Opry in the 70s. They meet on the beach and find common cause in the pursuit of idleness. Shayna’s entire family have perished in a freak blimp accident, while Beverley is an unhappy wife and at best indifferent mother of 12, lamenting the good old days of child physical abuse. But these domestic travails are mere details when there is some serious sunbathing to be done.

These reclining skin cancer cases waiting to happen are tanning while Bondi burns. It takes a while to warm to their sheer awfulness. With no filter - unless it is a cigarette filter - they toss out dark or filthy lines, characteristically oblivious to empathy and looking mainly for validation in each other when all around the environment fries. There’s plastic (plant pots) on the beach, suicidal seagulls and a gulf where Shayna’s seaside home crumbled into the sea.

This is eco-geddon as surreal soap opera. The initial braying banality of the dialogue ramps up into super slick back and forth volleys between creators Hines and Stafford, culminating in hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness monologues which are positively (negatively?) Beckettian in concept and execution. Fiona Shepherd

COMEDY

Viggo Venn: Only One ★★★

Ace Dome at Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 30 August

Gosh, Viggo Venn is a gorgeous dancer. I know this because he picked me for some audience participation, which is a risky move at this stage in the Fringe. There’s a lot of dancing in this show. Viggo, wearing a black tail coat waltzes elegantly around the stage, looking for someone to love. The Britain’s Got Talent Winner has made a bold choice putting aside his hi vis vest and re-inventing himself as a sad clown. But as we Fringe people know, he’s always been a clown, who not only studied with the great Philippe Gaulier in Paris but actually used to teach in his school.

At times you feel you are in a clown workshop. Viggo fixes you with his big soulful eyes and suddenly you are drawn into his story. The plot is a bit too wafer thin. But I love the fact Viggo has returned to his roots as a performer. He’s beautiful to watch and the young bar and venue staff are all staring at what he does as if it’s brand new. After a happy ending to his love story, there also is a little surprise bonus appearance from Viggo the television talent show star. Claire Smith

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