Jordan Brookes: Fontanelle ★★★★★ Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 25 August How can a comedy show displaying such dogged rectal fixation be so sophisticated? When it’s from the mind of Brechtian master of the form, Jordan Brookes, that’s when. As is typical with this past winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award, you find yourself lurching between agonising laughter and shock, and then lying awake for hours thinking about what it all means. On the face of it, Fontanelle is about how we mine tragedy for content, playing with ideas about how much time needs to pass before we can feast on it for entertainment.
But it feels like it's more about nihilism and the spectrum of masculinity in a quickly changing world. Brookes, with customary bare feet and legs, ambles on with a tiny captain’s hat stuck to his head. It’s right where his fontanelle – the soft spot on a baby’s head that remains vulnerable until parts of the skull grow to connect – would have been.
Could you be trusted not to press on yours if you had one as an adult? He talks about having travelled to see a bad musical about the Titanic, and how he became obsessed with the story. He muses upon everything from whether everybody on board truly wanted to survive, to the idea that distress signals seen from afar by potential rescuers could be misinterpreted as entertainment. It’s not a difficult metaphor to grasp.
Acknowledging that this might be an act of self-sabotage, he introduces audacious musical theatre parodies to his show. The incongruity is as delightful as the candid and the repeated references to male self-pleasure and corporeal exploration are bold. Brookes has crafted an extraordinary and elegantly timed and structured show that is absurd, unpredictable, dark and achingly funny.
And it’s so dense with jokes and captivating physicality that you don’t even have to let your head sink below the surface to love it. Ashley Davies Joshua Bethania: Coming Home ★★★ Gilded Balloon Patter House (Bothie) (Venue 24) until 26 August Winner of the 2022 So You Think You're Funny? new act competition, the amiable Joshua Bethania is a mostly deadpan, measured performer who could do with upping the gag rate in his fine but underpowered Fringe debut. The Indian comic has lived in this country for a number of years now and has a strong grasp of Britain's colonial impact on his homeland, even if the British do not.
And raised Christian, he confounds preconceptions. Destined to always be a minority, he observes studiously from the outside, with original takes on the Royal Family. Showcasing a droll humour about the outsourcing of British jobs to his home city of Bangalore and mindful that his gags about terrorism have got a little sharper in recent weeks, he's accomplished at placing his identity within a broader culture critique.
Moreover, routines about the 37-year-old's struggles with his mental health and on the dating scene after coming out of a long-term relationship afford him personability. Yet too often the dryness of his punchlines are matched by the dryness of his setups, lengthy discursive explanations that at their worst approach a lecture. At the close of Coming Home especially, he really needs to pepper the exposition with more jokes.
Jay Richardson Michelle Brasier: Legacy ★★★ Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 34) until 25 August In 2022 Michelle Brasier went to the cinema and was handed an envelope with her name on it. It contained Aus $10.50 but nobody there knew its origins.
In the midst of an uncomfortable and embarrassing medical crisis that coincided with a big work opportunity threatened by travel chaos, she attempted to solve the mystery. Was there another Michelle Brasier? What was she like? It’s a “rare, boutique, artisanal name” so the situation prompted her to consider all the different women she might have been had she made different choices in life. The story is told with lots of big-hearted and self-aware comic songs, the highlights including one taking the mickey out of the way millennials regard themselves.
She’s clearly a creature of musical theatre and has a spot-on impression of masculine acting in the genre and a funny story about an audition for Cats. Brasier, accompanied musically and by her real-life boyfriend Tim Lancaster (whose obvious adoration for her is ever so sweet to watch), has a stunning voice and is a naturally funny performer. The “legacy” premise, however, isn’t satisfying, nor, as Brasier herself indicates, does the mystery lead to a strong enough conclusion, but this is an entertaining hour that offers relentless, high-energy, drama-loving fun.
Ashley Davies Huge Davies: Album For My Ancestors (Dead) ★★★ Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August “This is the most personal show I’ve ever done," insists Huge Davies near the start of this hour of familial musical comedy and misadventure. It’s one of a series of half-truths delighted in by the poker-faced comic, who tells us we’re the worst audience he’s ever performed in front of. Bet you say that to all the crowds, Huge (he does).
The good-natured audience abuse continues throughout his set of often hilarious songs, either dedicated to, or ‘written’ by, various relatives. Calling for ‘respect’ for his Asian heritage, he largely deals in knowing cliche – from the practicalities of Pokemon hunting to a bad taste singalong about Hiroshima. He’s clearly unafraid to sail close to the wind.
He’s beset by technical problems throughout, with many of these seemingly by design – as his keyboard rebels, lighting cues fail and microphone batteries die. It’s a fun game to play to guess what has genuinely gone wrong and whether his exasperation is all part of the act. On this particular evening it felt like things genuinely started to fall apart, a callback-laden closing number ending things with a whimper rather than a bang.
Overall the show is akin to a fairground ride that’s not passed safety checks – fun, but a little bit (too) terrifying. David Hepburn Emma Holland ★★★ Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three) (Venue 33) until 25 August A third culture kid, amiably skittish Australian stand-up Emma Holland grew up in Indonesia, the basis of her jumbled but appealing Fringe debut. An arty type, she affects outrage that she's been characterised as a “collage comedian”.
However, that's undeniably the patchwork form of her multimedia hour, which builds up snapshots of her early life with frequent digressions, so that Indonesia itself as a country and people remain frustratingly vague, bar the odd compelling detail such as her living next to a dog fighting ring or acquiring rescue rabbits from a satay seller stall. The saviour complex she developed for animals is psychologically intriguing. But she only mines it at the most superficial level and there's a fair bit of filler-y type backstory of how she went through the motions of campaigning for the plight of orangutans in her school environmental club.
Never feeling fully part of the Asian country or the land of her birth, it's an interesting perspective for a comic. But it manifests itself in her flitting unsatisfyingly in and out of her core narrative for some deliberately naff merchandise she's designed, semi-amusing thoughts on the film The Mothman Prophecies and a running joke at the expense of American comic Arj Barker, relatively niche cultural references that require too much setting up for the resulting payoffs. Jay Richardson.
