Eleanor Morton: The Mermaid – 13:00 at Monkey Barrel, Cabaret Voltaire 1
Eleanor Morton’s previous hour, Haunted House, was notable for its elaborate sets and costumes, and for starting the show as the room filled. The Mermaid continues this, a lovely set and strikingly sparkly costume, and Eleanor Morton sitting on stage as we walked in, doing something plot-relevant. This turn toward the theatrical is working well for her, and in this case, the rocks of her mermaid-based set fit perfectly into the stone basement venue. It makes the audience feel like we’ve been lured underground by a siren’s call.
Morton addresses sirens in her show, and mermaids, and cartoon ducks, and real-life women who wear makeup sometimes, and how the patriarchy likes to throw all of those into similar boxes sometimes. It’s a show about feminism and bullying and sexuality and mythological creatures.
Morton delivers most of this while sitting down and speaking matter-of-factly, casually flicking through images on the PowerPoint, even through some wild subject matter. It’s a fairly expected metaphor: mythological female monsters to real female sexuality viewed as monstrous, but Morton finds some unexpected ways of exploring it, delving into examples from the animal kingdom to manosphere podcasts. And there is a fittingly theatrical payoff.
This show is funny, and smart, sometimes angry, and deeply analytical. It points out absurdities that it can take decades of an outsider perspective to see.
Nish Kumar: Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy WIP – 14:50 at Monkey Barrel 3
I must declare a bias here: I think Nish Kumar is one of the top few comedians working today, and his previous two hours, Your Power Your Control and Nish Don’t Kill My Vibe, are some of my favourite stand-up shows in history. I once travelled over 30 hours, round trip, just to see Nish Don’t Kill My Vibe live, and came away considering the effort entirely worth it. No review by me (or, it’s worth noting, by anyone else in the world) will be unbiased, but this one will be more biased than usual.
Having said that, Nish Kumar has done what I thought nearly impossible, which is write another show that lives up to incredibly high standards set by his previous one. Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy manages to do one thing that’s very rare in stand-up in 2026: cover a bit of ground that I’ve not heard any other comedian cover. This is in the central pillar of the show; it’s about generational cohorts (okay, many comedians have discussed age-based generations, but Kumar comes at it from a direction that feels fresh).
If I were looking for something to criticise, I wish the show were structured a little more carefully with that pillar at the centre. But it’s been moving toward that over the course of months of WIPs, and the current version ties ideas together nicely.
Angry Humour From a Really Nice Guy repurposes a short routine from Nish Don’t Kill My Vibe – this is one that I found slightly out of place in the previous show, but it fits better here, and Kumar does a better job of explaining what the story’s meant to illustrate.
This show has everything one would expect from Nish Kumar these days: the political made personal, the personal made political, a lot of shouting about important issues, a fair bit of shouting about unimportant issues, a lot of stuff that you absolutely cannot say on TV, a surprising amount of references to 1970s rock music. It’s relentless, like he always is. It made me lose my breath helplessly from laughter multiple times. If anyone only knows him as the guy who was mildly annoying on Mock the Week, I cannot recommend his stand-up, and this show in particular, highly enough.
Britney: Holy Mackerel! – 16:50 at Pleasance Courtyard, Beside
Whenever I see a sketch show, I think of that old Mitchell & Webb joke in which they go through the sketches for their next episode, and decide to have “hit, hit, miss, hit, miss, miss”. This is how sketch shows often feel, so it’s notable when I find one that doesn’t. Some sketches in Holy Mackerel! were better than others, but all elicited at least a few laughs. All were good enough to have the audience buy into their premise, despite unchanging costumes and sparse props.
This may be because there was only a loose effort to connect the sketches, so the focus instead went to making them stronger individually. They don’t try to transcend the genre, or the image of sketch comedy as amateur-ish – they play in that, and show that it can be really funny.
A lot of sketch shows I’ve seen tend to struggle with ending sketches – they’ve spent several minutes building up a world and concept, and it’s hard to find a punchline good enough to justify that. Nearly every sketch in Holy Mackerel! had a solid ending – one that feels like payoff, rather than just petering out or a sudden blackout.
There’s no explicit message to this show, besides the fact that it’s enormous fun to have fun with your best friend – and if you’ve been friends long enough, and happen to both have significant writing and performing talent and spend many months polishing your sketches, then it’s so much fun that it’ll even be fun for other people who watch it. This comes together in an ending that feels genuinely heartwarming, but don’t worry, it’s short; most of this show won’t try to warm your heart. It’s just funny.
Larry Dean: Hellbent – 18:30 at Pleasance Courtyard, Beyond
This took place in a large, full, excited room; there was a strong sense of Dean performing to a “hometown crowd” (in quotes because he discusses in the show that he’s from Glasgow and it’s very different from Edinburgh – but there were a lot of Glaswegian accents in the audience, so it still felt hometown). The audience was raucous, clapping and cheering for his jokes, gasping at the dramatic bits, going respectfully quiet at the emotional bits. This is the second time I’ve seen Larry Dean live in Scotland, and both were a great time.
This show is loosely based around his recent wedding, which is usually a subject that will make me avoid a show, but this one spares us the tedious wedding-planning details. It’s also largely unsentimental, which means the short moments of genuine sentiment hit hard and effectively.
Larry Dean makes extensive use of the many tools at his disposal – physical comedy in the way his limbs seem able to curl around themselves, a talent for sudden screeching noises that can break up a lulling routine, facial expressions that range from odd to truly creepy, accents and voices and impressions that can punch up any joke. He’s not just reciting his material, he’s performing it, far more so than you normally see in straight stand-up (pun genuinely not intended, as it’s a show about his gay wedding).
He hits some common topics – his marriage, proposal, family relationships, mental health (his autism, his partner’s OCD, intrusive thoughts acted out in a wildly visceral way), sex, religion – but comes at them with an edginess that would make many people blush, and made this evening crowd scream in appreciation. He somehow comes across as both polished and professional – every word and gesture planned to mine the humour correctly – and wildly unpredictable.
Crybabies: The Scaring – 20:00 at Pleasance Courtyard, Pleasance Two
This was my first time seeing Crybabies live, after hearing very positive things about them for a long time, and having tickets to this show in Edinburgh 2025 before it got cancelled. When I finally saw it this year, it lived up to the hype. I’ve seen it described as a sketch show, but this was an entire comedy play, with only three people playing an amazingly large number of characters.
It’s a parody of horror media, but one that dives so deeply it almost is a piece of horror media. It features quite a lot of auditory and visual jumpscares – I say this as a warning to those who are easily affected by that, as I dropped my bag on the floor in surprise several times. It is also, at a few points, genuinely scary. But mostly it’s incredibly funny.
This show is very polished, with a clearly high budget for props and set and costumes, sound effects and lighting used to great effect. It was interesting to see this so soon after watching Britney, who’d establish a new sketch by moving a chair around. The latter felt exactly like a Fringe Festival show (I mean that in a positive way), while the former felt like they should be in a national theatre somewhere, rather than a wooden box atop some stairs (I mean this in a positive way as well). About halfway through The Scaring, I started to feel like this might be too professional, but we then got the show’s one bit of messiness, as one performer tried to mess another up with a flashlight.
I laughed consistently throughout the hour, as did the rest of the audience, contagiously.
Elf Lyons: Is the Woman on the Edge – 21:30 at Pleasance Courtyard, Beyond
This was my first time seeing Elf Lyons live, again after a lot of hype and accolades. It was my second intense character piece of the day, seeing it right after Crybabies, but in this case, Lyons played every character on her own.
Everything in this show feels perfectly planned – she’s reflected, exactly right, in the mirrors placed in the centre of the stage. Parts of it feel like highbrow art, and then the next second she’s doing a gag where she pretends a banana is a phone. She screams, she sings, she dances around the stage, figuratively and at times literally, performing the whole thing while standing on tip-toes like a perfectly Gaulier-trained clown. She plays with her costume and the lighting and the sound effects.
She does a lot of impressive lip synching to a variety of audio, slipping from one character into another. Even at its most abstract, this show covers sufficiently concrete ground to feel accessible, being about very human relationship issues. It’s an amazing feat of physical performance to watch and listen to, with a fittingly powerful ending.
Lyons got a standing ovation, which was well-deserved, but I had to take off as the ovation started so I could run across multiple city blocks to make:
Luke McQueen: Comedian’s Comedian – 22:50 at Pleasance Dome, Ace Dome
Luke McQueen did this show in Edinburgh 2025, then performed it in various places since, including MICF, and has brought it back to Edinburgh 2026 for just a few nights. I saw it in Edinburgh last year, and loved it so much that I felt the need to see it again. I’d expected to find it sold out, given its popularity last year and short run this year, so was surprised to find the room just over half full.
It turns out that a half-full small room at 11 PM is a fantastic way to see this show. I’m glad I saw it last year, at a more sensible time, with every beat hit correctly. I’m also glad that this year, I got to see a looser version, with McQueen more frequently breaking character to riff on something in the room, or joke about how the run has been going, or point out how his Live at the Apollo joke doesn’t work anymore.
This was technically my third intense character piece of the day, though Comedian’s Comedian plays with whether it’s 100% a character. It plays with lofty ideas like authenticity and the nature of art and ambition, but in the most lowbrow possible way, frequently leaving McQueen literally rolling on the floor. It asks interesting questions, it offers intentionally insufficient answers, it sometimes makes the audience gasp with shock, but mainly, it’s very funny.
I must declare another bias here: I’m a massive fan of the actual Comedian’s Comedian podcast, for which this show is something like an extremely twisted piece of fanfiction. Knowledge of the podcast allowed me to catch a few little bonus referential jokes – but those are brief, and knowing the podcast is not required to enjoy this show. All you need to enjoy this is a basic sense of humour, an interest in how performance works, and an iron stomach to get through the intentionally, hilariously, cringe comedy bits.
Dave Baillie