A nominee for Edinburgh Comedy Awards best newcomer, a past best show winner, and stars of Taskmaster UK and New Zealand: reviews of shows performed 26-28 August, 2026.
Beside at Pleasance Courtyard
Emma Doran – Emmaculate poster
Andy Beill
I’m shocked to discover this is Irish comic Emma Doran’s debut at the Edinburgh Fringe. She has the air of someone who’s been doing it for years, with just her latest batch of yarns to bring us.
She gets straight into them in strong fashion with a cutting set of anecdotes about her mother, and then her own arrival into motherhood with a teen pregnancy conceived, improbably, on the waltzers at the funfair. Her daughter is now a young adult, having survived her teenage years which Doran relates to her own, bumming cigarettes and encountering men of the time whose behaviour was all too casually overlooked. She brings us up to the present day, where having younger sons lands her in the hell of WhatsApp parenting groups.
You could equally imagine these routines holding their own in a comedy club filled with rowdy hen parties, or here in the darkened room of an arts festival where the crowd response is almost as raucous. Hopefully this is just the start of Emma Doran’s Fringe career. ★★★★☆
Monkey Barrel Comedy – Monkey Barrel 1
Front of Phil Ellis’s mind at all times is having fun, with a wealth of gags and stories up his sleeve. He switches comfortably between self-deprecation and mocking the audience with an intended mild arrogance. There is indeed a lot of fun in this (nearly) hour, but also an uneasy sense we’re being a little shortchanged by what’s being left out.
Ellis arrives on stage ten minutes late, possibly for the purpose of the opening joke, though it’s unclear. As are the constant references to missing out bits of the set and asking the sound technician every five minutes how long he has left to fit in the rest.
A Powerpoint presentation is in play but may have been used all of half a dozen times. He gets a lot of humour out of two fantastic photos from his childhood photo album, though doesn’t take this theme further. Who knows whether there were more photos in the slideshow but we just never got to them. Chaos and tangents are perfectly good components of a performance, but I’ve genuinely no idea whether I’ve watched the show broadly as it was written or not – and if some Phil Ellis gold was left unseen. ★★★☆☆
Jordan Brookes: The Part of You That’s Always Screaming
Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome
Jordan Brookes poster
Andy Beill
For those familiar with 2019 Edinburgh Comedy Awards winner Jordan Brookes, this is possibly a tamer show than you might have become accustomed to. For those experiencing him for the first time, he may still be unlike any other comedian you’ve seen.
Themes largely focus on the fear of being caught looking weird in public: eating a croissant on a train or dropping an earphone on the street. He demonstrates why the worst thing computer hackers could see on his webcam would not be if he’s looking at porn but how pathetic it must appear the rest of the time he’s going about his business.
It’s good observational humour, if treading ground other comedians are capable of. And then he performs one routine it’s scarcely believable other human beings are capable of, never mind something you’d ever expect in a comedy show.
The energy in the room on this particular night is low. Brookes himself acknowledges he’s responding any time there’s a distraction from the audience; anything, he says, to divert him from the show he’s been performing night after night for nearly a month.
There are still more laughs here than most other shows at the Fringe. But this is just the high bar set by his previous work you’re comparing it with. ★★★★☆
Omar Badawy: Guided Detour
33 Pleasance Courtyard – Bunker One
Omar Badawy was nominated for best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for this show, which features a decent smattering of solid joke-writing, albeit interspersed with some that feel a little thin – for example, suggesting how a set of hypothetical scenarios might be framed in a sinister Daily Mail headline.
He alludes to being Cambridge raised, from an Egyptian Muslim family, which he says is probably giving off Rishi Sunak vibes. It’s hard to avoid the impression there is something of the politician in his confident, not clearly natural delivery.
It all came off somehow too rehearsed, each line being a bit too forcefully over-sold. Take away these hard edges and add a little more subtlety and responsiveness to the room, there’s some promising writing going on underneath. ★★½☆☆
Ray O’Leary: I Can See O’Leary Now The Ray Has Gone
Cabaret Bar at Pleasance Courtyard
Ray O’Leary poster
Andy Beill
New Zealand’s Ray O’Leary presents an hour of pure stand-up, full of tightly written jokes. His style of speech is [checks thesaurus for a neutral adjective] unhurried. In a monotone voice he tells every line in deadpan fashion, whether picking apart the failings in Billy Joel’s Piano Man lyrics or taking a sharp steer into darker territory.
There’s no particular takeaway from this show. He isn’t here to put the world to rights. The persona he puts across is just trying to amble through life without being called out for doing something weird, and of course we’re here to see behind the mask. ★★★★☆
Ray O’Leary might not be the performer for everyone, if you like your comedy to be big and brash. But if you like it dry, to draw a metaphor from the show’s title, the rain has not only gone, there’s a severe drought.
