Fringe comedy reviews: The Burton Brothers: 1925 | Barry Ferns: My Seven Years As Lionel Richie + more

Assembly George Square (Venue 8) until 24 August

Under the present White House incumbent, it isn't difficult to see why Josh and Tom Burton seek nostalgic refuge in the USA of a century ago.

And yet the 1925 Americana that the Australian brothers conjure in their sketches is every bit as destabilising and chaotic as our present time, a weird and often macabre world where deviance and the inexplicable lurk behind gossamer-flimsy facades of wholesomeness. With The Great Depression looming, the impressively in-step siblings truly face the music and dance.

They croon tunefully too. Evoking Tin Pan Alley, evangelist fervour and carny, snake oil hucksterism, the tight-trousered pair jump in and out of skits with jazzy panache, enthusiastically selling themselves with energetic zeal.

A case in point is their opening routine as drill sergeants, serving up manly visions of martial sacrifice, yet utterly failing to suppress their war trauma and romantic heartbreak.

A gullible rube confounds himself in an olde time hall of mirrors, a showcase for Josh's elastic-limbed slapstick. But it's the duo's fervour for freakshow that directly brings in the audience and the house down, the incongruous nature of modern hairstyles and clothing to their chortling sensibilities sending them into paroxysms of scheming delight.

Elsewhere, a fire and brimstone southern preacher struggles to keep his trad wife from going off the rails, with everything reminding her of her degenerate theme park past.

A couple of standout routines: the pair's depiction of Universal's greatest horror icons, Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster, meeting for lunch, is such a lovingly crafted and lovable portrayal of bitchy, backstabbing frenemies with the world at their feet and so many skeletons in the closet, that it feels as if it should run to further instalments.

And Tom's performance as a struggling entertainer, suddenly propelled to stardom by his enigmatic tiddlywinks routine is cinematically compelling, with a hilariously dark denouement.

Jay Richardson

Barry Ferns: My Seven Years As Lionel Richie ★★★★

Just the Tonic at the Caves (Venue 88) until 24 August

From the moment he first stepped onto a comedy stage at the age of 15, Barry Ferns was in love. Later, Edinburgh Fringe became his wonderland, a magic kingdom where he could live for one month a year and look forward to fame, to fortune, to unimaginable riches.

His show, he says ‘is the Fringiest Fringe show in all the Fringe.’ It’s in a dirty, badly ventilated haunted vault. It’s at a free venu, but one which demands 40 per cent of the bucket.

So where did it all go wrong? Barry, a working-class boy from Dorset, could never get his foot on the bottom rung of the comedy ladder. He placed highly in comedy competitions, he was wooed by big venues, and he was a master of marketing, inventing a series of stunts which included covering Edinburgh with stickers and changing his name to Lionel Ritchie by deed poll.

Ferns is funny, he’s creative, he’s full of ideas but somehow he never quite fit what the industry demanded. He chased his dreams, his debts mounted, he became homeless, but still he could never stop believing.

Big telly fame finally beckoned, until that too fell apart. Barry’s kept all the receipts and it’s painful viewing. He evokes the ghosts of Fringes past and lays bare the economic reality of an unsuccessful pursuit of fame. The tenacity is impressive – but it will make you cringe.

But comedy didn’t abandon him. Ferns found a way to survive which let him live the life he loved while also ensuring a better future for young comics.

It’s a dreadful dreadful story which unexpectedly turns into an inspirational one. And it explains why there’s such a tremendous love and respect among his peers for the man previously known as Lionel Richie.

Claire Smith

Eric Rushton: Innkeeper ★★★

Hive 2 at Monkey Barrel Comedy (Venue 313) until 24 August

Eric Rushton does not mention the word “incel” once in his Edinburgh hour, which is strange because that is pretty much all this hour is about.

From the Nativity play where he tried and failed to pull Mary, to the university comedy group where he tried and failed to pull a fellow comic, Eric paints a depressingly dismal picture of his romantic history.

He leans heavily into the story of his mental health – his bouts of depression, his ADHD, his experience of medication. There’s a redemption arc of sorts but there’s just too much misery, self-pity and self-deprecation.

It’s a shame, because Rushton does have a rather appealing dry delivery and he can construct a joke. But pretty much all his punchlines rely on self-hatred, wanking, pornography and, of course, the use of the world “paedo”. To be fair he only says “paedo” once but his material is so unrelentingly grim it puts me in a fury.

When it first began, the ‘comedy explores mental health’ phenomenon was genuinely interesting. But the shows were never only about mental health. Comics built narratives which revealed their story rather than forcing the audience to relive it with them.

Claire Smith

Bennet Kavanagh: Crank Up the Volume!! (To a Reasonable Volume) ★★★

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 22 August

One of those acts who tongue-in-cheek berates an audience for not entirely investing in his creative vision, the endearingly stroppy Bennet Kavanagh fully demands that you get onboard with his musical stylings.

Which can make it a bit of an uphill struggle when he's undersold. Or when no-one in the audience has seen the Jason Statham thriller Crank, or, indeed, its sequel, with the franchise not so much a load-bearing cultural foundation of his debut hour as every second thought in his head.

Citizen Kane is damned by comparison to the adrenaline-fuelled Statham romp, with pigheaded perversity a big part of the keyboard-wielding Kavanagh's shtick. But as he ultimately alludes to, he's had much more difficult recent circumstances threaten to derail his hour.

His prickliness at a show partially built on things appearing to go wrong can seem a bit too successful at times. But there's some lovely, fantasy-based whimsy in it, some amusing if needlessly aggressive attacks on cultural icons and pernickety point-scoring at the expense of David Bowie, Michael Jackson and more.

And his finale is just an uncannily odd, inexplicable delight in its distortion of the human voice and therapy.

Jay Richardson

Ellen Turnill Montoya is Mr Handsome ★★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 24 August

One of the more visually memorable, thematically thorough bits of buffoonery you're likely to see this Fringe, Ellen Turnill Montoya's creation Mr Handsome is a giant hand.

Leading the audience through a series of fist-based puns and palm-related aerobics, the British-Mexican character comic has grasped the essential truth that despite constantly using our hands, we otherwise pay them little heed and take them for granted, affording her endless opportunities for original humour based on observations hidden in plain sight.

To this, in her outsize, fleshy costume, she's bolted an endearing fall-from-grace tale, as legendary hand model Mr Handsome finds himself yesterday's extremity, unable to retain his grip on stardom.

Continuing to be troubled by the break-up of his double act, his descent into the gutter is graphically presented with big, over-the-top commitment, childlike silliness, but more than a few risqué lines on the part of Turnill Montoya, who refuses to pass up any opportunity for a hand-based gag.

Energetic and rabble-rousing, with strong use of props and backing visuals, Mr Handsome's plot is straightforwardly predictable but it's the framing of the performance that's the thing. Daft and undemanding, it's a light-hearted, reviving tonic for the soul.

Jay Richardson

The Cringe Factor ★★

The Three Sisters (Venue 272) until 24 August

This is a very comfortable hour, in which Ian Fox and Vladimir McTavish indulge in some low key banter, introduce a couple of friends who join in, and we watch many video clips of TV shows and adverts which they deem to have 'The Cringe Factor'.

And so we get footage of The Late Late Breakfast Show going fatally wrong and Charles Manson giving an exceptionally strange interview. We get excerpts from 70s sitcoms and 60s adverts. And of course all the usual suspects get a mention – from Rolf Harris to OJ Simpson.

I just think I expected more cringe.

Kate Copstick

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