Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Nate Kitch: Something Different!!!!! | Toussaint Douglass: Accessible Pigeon Material | Aaron Wood: More to Life | Amelia Hamilton: Forget Me Not | Alasdair Beckett-King: King of Crumbs

Nate Kitch: Something Different!!!!! ★★★★★

Snug at Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 25 August

This is a show for true comedy aficionados. Not because it is very, very funny – which it is. But because it plays with so many comic ideas, techniques and formulas. It’s like one of those posh restaurants where they take something like a Caesar salad and serve all the ingredients as separate portions. Or it’s like a Matisse painting, or like jazz, where all the bits fly apart and regroup in an order that simultaneously makes sense – and doesn’t.

On the other hand, it is very much like the Morecambe and Wise sketch, where Eric Morecambe plays all the right notes “but not necessarily in the right order.”

Oh my god. Nate Kitch has infested my review with his crazy deconstructionist ideas. Some people say Kitch is anti-comedy, but actually he loves it a lot. There are always other comics in the room and he plugs their shows, willingly disrupting his own in the process. He’s a great fan of leaving the room and disappearing behind the blackout curtains. At one point he even manages to usher someone from another queue into his show, making the audience and the abductee fall about laughing “What show IS this?” says the baffled Dutch woman. She looks as if she really wants to stay.

Kitch sends up the fabled emotional arc of the Edinburgh show, accidentally ruining his own 45-minute “sad bit” with a technical error. He mixes up biographical details of his own family and wildly exaggerates mild health scares in the name of “using your own life history as material”. Kitch loves the confusion, he loves the lulls. He batters his own props, takes phone calls on stage, repeats himself and appears to lose the plot. There’s an awful lot of toilet jokes in the show, which is puzzling until Nate reveals his highly fictional “How I became a comic” backstory.

He’s at the Gilded Balloon but with some Pay What You Want seats, which allows him to make a bucket speech which is a comic masterclass in desperation, bitterness and fake sincerity. Oh, and this year he has a hat, which takes centre stage in a hopelessly misremembered classic comedy routine. Oh, that Nate Kitch. What a trickster. My cheeks were aching from laughing after seeing this show. I’d go again in a heartbeat. Did I mention he has a hat?

CLAIRE SMITH

COMEDY

Toussaint Douglass: Accessible Pigeon Material ★★★☆☆

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 24 August

The Fringe is full of niche shows dedicated to wildly varying obsessions. Yet few can match Toussaint Douglass and his professed hyperfocus for pigeons. Preceding his birth, felt by his beloved Windrush-generation grandmother and now part of his sense of belonging to an ethnic birdwatchers group, the pigeon theme is truly strong here.

Nevertheless, the comic declares himself contractually obliged to talk about himself more broadly in this, his intermittently very funny debut. Sharing his upbringing in less-than-lovely Lewisham, Douglass retains a little boy lost vibe, as if still tied to his late Nana's apron strings, finding himself properly only recently. It seems unlikely from his goofy self-portrait that he's a new father in a long-term relationship. But he openly admits to not being the decision maker in his family unit.

In this respect, he's only mildly distinct from his own father, who boxes clever around his emotional reticence. This routine, with Douglass dedicatedly jabbing at audience members, keeping them at bantering arm's length is one of the show's abiding visual metaphors, with those instances where he subverts standup convention and playfully surprises the best bits. Ultimately foregrounding the comic's neurodivergence, gently leftfield, this thing with feathers truly tickles.

JAY RICHARDSON

COMEDY

Aaron Wood: More to Life ★★★☆☆

Hoots @ The Apex (Venue 108) until 25 August

Aaron Wood is an instantly engaging stand-up, endearing himself with a series of relatable, low-level gripes and tales of living in lively Stockport, where the sounds of a neighbour's domestic row or his own home being burgled afford him all the drama he needs. Confessing to a harsh judging tendency, the confidence of Americans and the flawed underlying logic of I'm A Celebrity bushtucker trials are easy targets but he mocks them efficiently.

Ostensibly, he seems like any other newish but fairly accomplished club comic. Yet latent mention of his neurodiversity is eventually followed by admission of his special educational start in life, where his relative high-function cast him into a role of horrified observer and somewhat brutal anecdotalist now.

Despite going into counselling, his awkwardness with his therapist exacerbated by her attractiveness, Wood can't afford too much sensitivity. His father's disappearance from, and grasping recent re-emergence into his life is a prime case study in narcissism. But the comic amusingly gains his revenge, poetically so after his mother had badgered him to break into TV. Throughout, Wood's girlfriend is an intermittent source of reassurance and cause of his insecurities and he shares tales of their relationship and travels with capable aplomb.

JAY RICHARDSON

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COMEDY

Amelia Hamilton: Forget Me Not ★★★☆☆

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 24 August

Amelia Hamilton was raised to believe that she could do anything, with the loose premise of her lively Fringe debut confronting reality. For her sister, parental backing led to pole-dancing. But for Hamilton, it's combining stand-up with rap, blasting out hard with the latter in her introduction. Although a proud feminist working in STEM with a catchy refrain to ram home the message, she's also, regrettably, moved back to the family home, capering through an equally earworm track about her mother's paranoia about her perishing in a domestic inferno.

Exploring the sexualised reappropriation of family roles, she's resisting her cosseted upbringing and the drag of a relationship, for a more uncertain future and potential legacy, reasoning in rhyme that even today's sweet old ladies were badasses in their heyday. Stereotypically for a musical comic, she leans into the persona of the vengeful psychopath occasionally, aided by the formal aggression of hip hop. Generally though, she finds a smooth segue between her stand-up and rapped routines, easing the transitions further with some attentive crowd questioning.

The performative rhythms of the rap sometimes makes Hamilton's material seem more showily impressive than uproariously funny. Still, she's a distinctive act with an unwillingness to inhibit herself.

JAY RICHARDSON

COMEDY

Alasdair Beckett-King: King of Crumbs ★★★☆☆

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 11 August

In a harsh world of shouty competitiveness, Alasdair Beckett-King's authentic brand of imaginative comedy is a balm. We are, after all, talking about a man whose approach to nostalgia involves phrases such as “Whither the Pop Tarts of yesteryear?” and who jokingly suggests that “My father, the Duke, shall hear of this,” is a workable riposte to bullies.

While one might normally avoid referring to an act’s appearance, ABK gets so much mileage out of describing his distinctive look – pale-skinned and slender with long, thick, red hair – that it simply can’t be ignored. And there’s a particularly unforgettable bit about which music not to whistle when walking behind somebody in the dark.

There’s no real theme to this show: it’s more of a collection of cleverly written, often silly, thoughts about everything from the speed with which ducks quack to the full unionisation of fairy lights in the 1990s (“One out, all out” – lovely). There’s a subtle thread of kind-minded politics glistening quietly here, but, really, it’s lighthearted, undemanding fun with some quirky graphics thrown in for good measure.

ASHLEY DAVIES

READ MORE: The Best Edinburgh Fringe Comedy 2025: Every show with a four or five star review from The Scotsman so far