Fringe comedy reviews: Emma Doran: Emmaculate | Absolute Bus Stops of Northern Europe and Beyond + more

Emma Doran: Emmaculate ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 30 August

With the punch and momentum of a club set and the intimate openness of a white wine session with your best friend, Emma Doran makes an hour waltz by with entertaining stories about her blended family and earlier life.

Doran’s mother looms large in the laugh-drenched hour. She’s a woman who prioritises having an “immaculate” home above all else, and apparently detests the oblivious man she’s married to. In other hands it might feel bleak, but Doran’s a gifted storyteller who never drops the pace.

Deploying great dollops of adult humour (maybe don’t take your parents unless you’re happy to hear jokes about “riding” in their company), she tells us how she got pregnant at 18, didn’t have her next child till a decade later, and how she feels about many of the people in her life.

For all its breezy accessibility, there’s an underlying fortitude here. Without a droplet of self-pity, Doran touches upon some pretty difficult or dark stuff that should be shocking, but kind of isn’t. Is this because of her matter-of-fact, “laugh it off”, delivery or because all women know someone who’s been through something similar – if they haven’t themselves?

Either way, there’s an irresistible truth to it all that, blended with Doran’s polished routines and remarkable instinct to be funny, makes for a real banker of a show.

This comic has already got a huge following in Ireland, where she appeared on the original Last One Laughing, and has a popular podcast called Keep it Tight with Deirdre O’Kane but, for all her experience, this is technically her Fringe debut, and she’s got a tour in the pipeline.

Emmaculate’s punchline – a quote about the inevitability of health challenges that she attributes to her grandmother – will be ringing in your ears for days. Broadcasters should be beating down Doran’s door to make a sitcom of her life. Ashley Davies

Absolute Bus Stops of Northern Europe and Beyond ★★★★★

Paradise in the Vaults (Venue 29) until 15 August

Comedy infrequently gets much better than this. I should hasten to add that this is comedy that exists outwith the realm of the 'real joke'. But what there is is in this hour of man's obsession with bus stops and everything bus stop related is tangible, contagious joy.

And you will laugh – in delight, in recognition and in surprise – but you will laugh. By the end of his show, you might find yourself mildly obsessed too.

Certainly we join in the rating of bus stops across the advertised geographical area with more genuine enthusiasm than, I am sure, any of us ever imagined we might. Our friendly bus stop (it seems wrong, although time saving, to abbreviate to bs) enthusiast and teacher drives a double decker through his fourth wall right at the start, asking us for the last time we travelled by bus.

Do not think this is one of the shows that have a metaphorical title for a show that is actually about childhood trauma in Norway. This is ALL about bus stops. Yes, some of them in Norway (one even scores a 9.5). There is philosophy as we examine “what is a bus stop?”, and look at the Waitrose effect on bus stop structure. There is 'Genuine Shakespeare' and some of the history of the omnibus, and of course, its stops.

Sadly, we have to accept that Paris has most chic Arret d'Autobus, posit the Big Question “how do we get to 10?” and, of course, we end on a song.

This show is pretty much everything a Fringe show should be : it is an hour spun from one warmly mild-mannered man's obsession with the most unlikely of objects, illustrated with photos and lively with songs. We get weird facts, Joe Dolce and, should you doubt the depth of his commitment to bus stops, a calculation of the percentage of the earth's surface taken up by bus stops. Public transport accessories as an art form. Kate Copstick

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Kate Dolan: Trout ★★★★

Monkey Barrel Comedy (Monkey Barrel 2) (Venue 515) until 30 August

If still waters run deep for some, the frenetically churning whirlpool of Kate Dolan's mind is chaos above and below the surface. The piscine metaphor of the British-Australian comic's latest irrepressibly animated hour reflects how she grew up wanting to be a dancer but now maintains that she hopes to become a fish, taking the stage in a giant trout mask to surpass Captain Beefheart's.

A front foot act who never stops trying to hook you, Dolan casts every line at her considerable disposal in scooping up the audience, needily singing, readily dancing, hectoring you into comprehending her turbulent thoughts.

These essentially hark back to a cutting remark made to the comic when she was a child, that she didn't have the requisite body shape to be a dancer. Yet that's arguably only the first trickle in a deluge of trauma that this ebullient performer discharges, a sizeable dump to be sure and you have to be open to receiving the escalating vulnerability.

But she's so damn committed, multi-faceted in her cycle of delivery modes and charismatically entertaining that its a trip worth clinging on for, going to some dark, dark places but with wild, aggressive resurgence.

The humane wisdom of her spectacularly thick best friend is straightforward light relief. And only the most hardened, self-centred man might fail to appreciate her sardonically witty and withering dismissal of the male mental health crisis.

With each fresh hour, Dolan grows ever more ambitious in the personal depths of what she's willing to dredge up. But for now, her stagecraft is rising to meet the challenge, the sense of affirmative self-acceptance and further performance thresholds for her to master tantalisingly within grasp. Jay Richardson

READ MORE: Fringe comedy reviews: Geoffrey Asmus | Kate Hammer | Maia Tassalini | Gareth Gwynn

Half-Orphan ★★★

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue17) until 16 August

This is New York-based comic Kevin McNulty's Fringe debut. But he knows all about the trappings and clichés of a “Dead Dad” show and delivers a superior, multimedia example of the genre.

Growing up in New Jersey, he was a developmentally impaired child from an academic family who subsequently blossomed as a maths whizz kid. And Half-Orphan is an initial flurry of charts and projections, with the mildly nerdy stand-up rationalising grief and being casually, amusingly dispassionate about it.

He's not wholly insensitive though. And when he relates the death of his earliest comedy collaborator, it's firmly established that humour and graphs are his coping mechanism. God knows, he needed something, as he then shares the tale of losing his father as a teenager, perhaps preventably, the jaw-droppingly slick funeral video showing a child scrambling to process the loss with bad jokes.

For a long time, McNulty's dad remained a dominant force in his life, as he followed him onto Wall Street and leveraged his half-orphanhood to rise up the finance ranks. Clearly though, something was awry. And the show becomes a dawning realisation as he digs into their Irish roots and confronts his trauma.

Wry, ultimately uplifting and compassionate, this is a warm, funny hour that anyone who's experienced serious grief will appreciate. Jay Richardson

Alastair Clark: On The Record ★★★

Slow Progress Cafe and Records (Venue 640) until 30 August

Jeffrey Lewis and the Voltage welcome us musically to Alastair Clark's hour, so get in early. They are a great start. Clark has the makings of a gloriously nerdy hour here and the moments when he lets rip on subjects from people insisting on adding “Simply” to Tina Turner's iconic hit, through the plague of browsers in record shops to emotional blackmail as a way to avoid queuing are in their own obsessive way, quite thrilling.

He is at peak nerd explaining with superbly unrestrained passion why Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit are in no way similar. It is absolutely glorious. And there is no need to know anything about either band. Richard will explain.

Between tales from the shop floor (and I so wish there had been more of these), we get Neil Armstrong (look out for the lovely driving joke), Scott Walker, Daedalus and big laughs at a funeral.

There is, at the end, an absolutely beautiful story about introducing a girl to the music of Nick Drake. It is entrancing and a brave and thought provoking way to end a show. Even if you can't stand Nick Drake. Kate Copstick

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