Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

‘Hello, I’m Alex and I’m an alcoholic.’ This is how Alex Stringer started her show, and presumably her journey to sobriety eight years ago, when she was just 23.

Yes, that is a young age, and a couple of unnerving stories of bad behaviour from her drunken days leave you in no doubt why she had to stop. The one about being sick in a cab is surely the grossest, but also has the funniest real-life payoff. 

That said, a woman in the audience contributed an arguably better anecdote about her most embarrassing drunken incident that gave the honed stand-up routine a run for its money. Stringer’s a natural at audience interaction, helping to draw this out, and sharing the limelight while it was being told. 

At other times, however, she can deploy her sarcastic Scouse sense of humour against those who contribute, such  as  getting a quick laugh from the  audience member who volunteered the fact that she was vegan for just a year. Stringer – one of this year’s cohort of Chortle Hotshot Fringe debutants – sometimes deploys similar scorn more generally in her prepared routines, too, such as mocking people who publicly hail ‘the best mum I could hope for’ in online messages. The monsters.

The story of Stringer’s recovery weaves through other club-ready stand-up material on anything from the dating app trope of men holding fish, her work as a phlebotomist in the NHS and the cultural gulf with her Serbian colleague and, in a very roundabout way, what a Liverpudlian merman might sound like.

Even through she papers over the gaps seamlessly, the train of thought is still fragmented, going from the general to the specifics about her similar addicted father, ‘live, laugh, love’ and takes from the psyche ward.

There’s nothing clever or showy here, but the material is a good mix of joke and anecdote, delivered effectively. And it’s quite heartening to include her notion that stand-up has helped save her, given that ‘the opposite of addiction is connection’. And connection is what she so instinctively forges here.

Review date: 12 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard