August 21, 2026 at Monkey Barrel
I scheduled 10 shows to watch on August 21 as, to misappropriate a John-Luke Roberts quote, an experiment in whether someone can do that. They were all at the Monkey Barrel. After each show, I wrote a short review that consisted of the number of words I could write before the start of the next one.
The Monkey Barrel is a great venue for something like this. All its rooms are close enough together for very short commute times, but going from room to room still forces you to briefly go outside and maybe even walk up a hill, which is important when you spend ten hours of a day sitting down in dark rooms. There are multiple establishments across the street that will give you quick food in short gaps between shows. And you can see a whole lot of basements.
10:35-11:35 – Sarah Keyworth – Work in Progress (Monkey Barrel 3)
A WIP that’s somehow both very early – mostly written within the last week – and funnier than many comedians’ completed hours. A return to written material after a couple of years with mainly crowd work shows, following their wildly successful (and MICF award winning) My Eyes Are Up Here show. They’ve returned with lots to say about a number of topics, including the ridiculousness of TERF logic, misogynist stereotypes, recent stabbings, gender euphoria as a nonbinary person, testosterone gel, ADHD meds, and one sad bit. They’ve written a full show in a week. The time focusing on crowd work has made them more confident than two years ago, when it comes to messing around on stage. They have a larger range of ways to mine humour from vocal and facial expressions. They’re a great comic who’s gotten even better.
12:10-13:10 – Chris Cantrill – Rewilding (The Tron)
A wildly affable person. In 2024, The Delightful Sausage had stopped doing their two-hander comedic plays, and both its members, Amy Gledhill and Chris Cantrill, did solo stand-up shows (with both getting nominated for the Edinburgh Best Show Award that year). When Cantrill made the transition to straight stand-up, his cape costume was the only remnant of his more theatrical roots. Rewilding is his follow-up show, and it returns toward more Delightful Sausage-style stuff, with a whole fantastical story, kooky characters in a lovingly created (and/or reported on, hard to tell how much this has in common with the real place where Cantrill lives) kooky setting, a mystery and some plot twists, lighting cues and video bits to add drama. It’s all the fun of his stand-up with more theatrics thrown back in. A great time.
13:30-14:30 – Ayo Adenekan – Homeland Insecurity (Cabaret Voltaire, room 2)
A fun hour and good jokes, nicely covered a wide range of topics. Gets into friendship, family relationships, queerness, ethnic identity, living in Edinburgh, moving to London, and coming of age. But it’s essentially, as he tells us, a show about love. It’s a collection of autobiographical anecdotes on that broad theme, approaching the topic in multiple genuinely heartwarming ways. It had the audience fully invested in his sweet story, excited by all its twists and turns. There were funny callbacks. It showed the comedian’s own love for the form and for his subject matter.
14:50-15:50 – Nish Kumar – Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy (Monkey Barrel 3)
My third time seeing this same show in three weeks, because it’s so good that I wanted to do that. This version had a few new lines since last time, he’s been adding little jokes throughout the festival. He seemed to somehow be talking even faster than usual in this iteration, trying to squeeze the material into an hour, running right up against the wall of his end time and not stopping for breath until he got there. It’s an incredible, brilliant show that made me laugh helplessly, no matter how many times I’ve seen it before.
16:15-17:15 – John Kearns – Tilting at Windmills (Monkey Barrel 3)
He’s got the wig, he’s got the teeth. He’s got the existential angst expressed through everyday stories. He’s got vivid images that build on themselves as he goes along. He’s got some sound cues, including a good Goon Show clip played in a charmingly low-tech way, from his phone on a stool. He’s gotten sudden bursts of energy, changes in volume and pace. He’s technically got a breakup show, though of course it’s far more than that. It’s everything you want from John Kearns.
17:40-18:40 – Lara Ricote – Inkling (Monkey Barrel 3)
Utterly beautiful, wildly hilarious, masterpiece is the only word for it. So many threads and so much symbolism and so much going on, 3 mics and physical comedy and props and costumes, and every bit of it is relevant, and everything’s a message, and the theme of the form follows the theme of the content, and the water stuff is so funny. It’s technically the second breakup show I’ve seen in two hours, but this is also a philosophy lesson and also an immersive experience in what (one person’s experience of one) disability is like. She stands on stage like the Oracle of Delphi, and like a clown, and like a disabled person communicating her communication barrier, and like a really really funny comedian. Surely one of the best shows of the year.
19:10-20:10 – Jonno – Here Comes Mr Funny (Monkey Barrel 2)
It’s a very funny collection of different types of bits – songs, parodies, confusing dance numbers, faux-spontaneous crowd interactions, falsely sincere ruminations, a few ruminations that may be actually sincere. It’s a cliche to compare comedians to Stewart Lee, but there’s no other way to describe the brilliance of his one routine that’s funny, then not, then goes on long enough to become funny again, over and over, it’s way too long and it’s so good. His persona is relentlessly endearing, every time he’d say something about his life he’d get audible “aw”s from the crowd, which made the rug pulls even funnier. It’s his debut solo stand-up hour but he brings years of sketch skill and incorporates that beautifully.
20:40-21:40 – Alice Fraser – Oh Man! (The Tron)
As well structured and intelligent as any Alice Fraser show, which is very high praise. Applies complex philosophical analysis to seemingly shallow topics – last year it was romance novels, this year it’s the Manosphere, she’s covered the whole gender spectrum. There are good insights, clever meta jokes, recontextualized callbacks, excellent dick jokes. And there are consist laughs from a Friday night crowd for humour that requires you to keep track of many aspects of the concept, that’s impressive for the timeslot. Alice Fraser is so very good at what she does, and in this show she’s ventured where many comedians haven’t, which is to really engage with the on-the-ground cultural aspects and effects of hyper-masculine culture. She’s come back to tell the arts festival about it, and apply her own analysis.
22:00-23:00 – Sarah Roberts – Scary Movie 7 (Monkey Barrel 2)
She comes out in a grim reaper costume and opens with stories of eating her twin in the womb, and it gets less weird after that, but that sets the tone for a show that makes everyday stories of things like dating and social media into something grotesque. She finds entertaining connections between reality and horror tropes – it’s sort of a show about horror, sort of a show about love. But it’s mainly about the universally relatable topic that life is really hard. Almost as hard as surviving a horror movie.
23:30-24:30 – David Correos – Noise Zealand (The Tron)
An exciting choice, to see this show at 23:30 on a Friday night, after I’ve been frying my brain on comedy shows for 13 hours straight, and felt like I might be starting to hallucinate, even before I went into that basement and watched a Kiwi dressed as various children’s characters do whatever that was. He asked us, “Tell people about the show, don’t tell them what I do in it.” I’ll honour that, and just say I laughed for nearly an hour straight. Rolling laughs, the kind where I’ll think things have calmed down and then some tiny part of the absurdity of the situation will hit me anew and I’ll be choking on my own laughter again. Everyone else in the crowd seemed to be laughing the same way, it was infectious. I think of the stories I’ve heard about wild old school alternative comedy, and this must be the closest I’ve experienced to that.
Dave Baillie