Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

It’s been a huge year for Rosco McClelland, as he acknowledges from the start. He won the Billy Connolly spirit of Glasgow award and was named best international act at the New Zealand comedy festival, all off the back of his 2024 Fringe show.

Yet he confesses it’s the first time he’s not been 100 per cent happy with stand-up, with depressive thoughts entering his usually happy-go-lucky mind for the first time. The reason, he believes, is because he exposed too much of his real self in last year’s show in an attempt to pander to critics whose opinions he never much valued. Even if it demonstrably worked – the reviews were excellent - it made him feel uncomfortable, slightly violated perhaps.

There’s obviously an interesting issue here about whether artists revealing their inner issues is cathartic or damaging, and understandably McClelland has retreated from going too intensely into the personal this year, beyond sharing his regrets.

Besides, the rare health issues at the heart of the comic’s show last year might have made for good copy but it’s  not what makes him a good comedian. That comes from his natural funny bones in making the everyday hilarious, and a performing style that’s both high energy and entirely natural. He is, indeed, a successor to the Big Yin.

His skill is that he can make a story about a Roomba cleaner escaping into the wild so perfectly uproarious, with small details that elevate the yarn almost to a Pixar-like story of a gentle soul lost in a hostile world.

He celebrates mad rock star names - and mocks mundane ones - and gets so wound up by the way plastic screw caps now stay attached to the bottle that he wants to start a revolution. The routines overlap and segue nicely, and slide into deeper topics. 

It’s a short step from the corporate greed behind that bottletop vexation to him expressing support for fellow Scottish comic Susan Riddell, arrested on terror charges for allegedly driving a car into a defence firm’s fence. And that rock-star routine pivots to Sum 41’s moshpit rule: If someone falls we stop and help him up. How is it that a punk band has a better moral code than most of society?

McClelland is wary of getting too serious – we know what happened last time – and he’s just as likely to end a sobering rant on global conflict with a silly pun as a call to arms. He deploys a dramatic Blackout sarcastically and whenever he’s in danger of getting too self-analytical he pulls himself back, saying: ‘Get over yourself you stupid fucking clown.’

It’s that no-nonsense, ‘spirit of Glasgow’ attitude that makes McClelland’s stand-up so potent, and which is on full display in How Could Hell Be Any Worse? He doesn’t need to spill his guts on a life-threatening condition to be funny. He just is.

Review date: 7 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club