Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Improv fans are spoiled for choice each Fringe, but aside from heavily themed shows – usually drawing on someone else’s intellectual property – how’s a punter to choose between all those identical promises of a  ‘hilarious new show every day based entirely on your suggestions!’

Holy Shit Improv is a safe bet in both senses of the word. The talented team, regulars  at UCB Theater in Los Angeles, absolutely know what they’re doing, although their slickness means there’s no major surprises in execution.

The format is two 20-plus minute long-form exercises, the first sparked from a single word from the audience. Tonight’s – ‘moat’ – triggered a memory in improviser Genetra Tull of digging a drainage ditch around her house with her dad. Imagine someone with those skills in an interview for an IT job is the prompt… and we’re off.

The aim of the five-strong team is not to produce a neat three-act playlet from this starting point. Instead, anyone can tap in at any time and set up the next scene to follow on from what we’ve just seen, normally – but not always – keeping one of the existing players on stage to show the consequences.

This keeps the pace up, but also takes a little pressure off. As soon as a scene starts to stutter, someone will bail out and move things on. Keeping the momentum going is the prime directive, and there’s never a point when this team run out of ideas of where to go next.

At the halfway point, a comedian guest comes on to share some stories/do some material. Tonight it’s Dylan Adler with anecdotes about his first travels outside the US, heaping scorn on Belgium (to the very vocal delight of one Dutch audience member) and describing how the language barrier led to hilarious misunderstandings on the dating apps. This then informs the second half of the show, which otherwise copies the first, except for offering more reference points to call back to.

Creating such running jokes is where many of the laughs come from, satisfying the human need for patterns. Tonight, those included the two-kids in a trench coat trope and confusion over the metric system leading drug dealers to sell ‘litres’ of meth. 

That and the troupe’s founder Casey Feigh being urged to perform a backflip, as Adler had done. With the aid of the rest of the troupe, he managed it, kinda. That also served as an illustration of how the improvisers work as a playful team as well as epitomising their animated performance.

Other strong ideas to emerge over the hour included an ad-hoc musical giving fellow improv stalwarts Shamilton a run for their money, a skit about New Yorkers deluding themselves about their lifestyle choices, and a domestic drama mocking how sweary Scots sound to American ears. 

Of course, not every mini-scene produces gold, but the Holy Shit players never dip below a respectable minimum – and the best skits wouldn’t be out of place in a scripted show. Plus they have the professional air of a company who can be relied upon to deliver similar results time after time.

Review date: 8 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House