Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If you’re a seasoned Fringe goer and you get accosted on Cowgate by a large man in a gold leotard, a huge ginger wig, a heavyweight champ belt and ​wrestling pads, you probably already have a fair idea of whether you’ll like where this encounter​ is taking you. 

Were you to follow his entreaties, you’d end up in the back room of a pub, thrown together with a few other unwary travellers, watching this man take part in a quiz. Yeah, you’d have thought it would involve some ​wrestling, but you’d be wrong. Fistymania is only ​wrestling themed; the stage isn’t big enough for anything physical, so the closest thing you’re likely to get is when Ant McGinley, aka the Ginger Ninja, rips his shirt in two at the end.

The Fistymania gameshow is spun out of a podcast, ​Wrestling With The Champ, and hosted by McGinley’s manager Damien St John. Every day he pits McGinley against a different comedian in a series of poorly-thought-through party games, and today it’s the turn of Stephen Catling, whose snail-themed show at the Fringe this year actually looks pretty interesting, but is absolutely the wrong choice for a show like this where you need to keep the energy up at all costs.

Aside from McGinley’s costume, the ​wrestling theme is extremely loose. Even the party games they play, which could easily have related to ​wrestling in some way, do not. 

Instead, in the first round the contestants have to guess who Britain’s most unpopular couples are. Perhaps wishing to shorten the process, Catling wisely cheats by reading the answers off St John’s notecards, which he accidentally holds in front of him throughout. 

Next, the audience have to pass a polystyrene head across the room in five moves, which immediately devolves into chaos because St John doesn’t explain the rules.

Obviously there’s no point being a stickler for the rules in a comedy pub game, it’s just that there’s not much else to grab onto here. There’s no real script or jokes, and McGinley and St John don’t add much improvisatory hosting pizzaz.

It just about holds the attention of the audience anyway because it’s less than 40 minutes long and there’s enough participation to keep people awake.

At its climaxes is a rap battle – McGinley extremely slow and ponderous on the beat despite the fact that he presumably does it every day; Catling rapping so quietly and far off the mic that he’s totally inaudible, which is definitely the funniest thing he could have done in that scenario.

Review date: 13 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ Boston Bar