Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

To forestall any surprises, the latest from Joe Sutherland is another solid hour of jokes and acidly camp fun that, like all his work, struggles to find a less superficial level to operate on. 

Nominally, Miss World is about building community, partly in response to Sutherland’s fear that he’s getting older and losing the value he once held as a twink, when he was prized among gay men for his youth and virility. 

Gay men, he says, are pressured by society into being fun – they aren’t allowed to have serious feelings. These are interesting points, but as Sutherland recently discovered in therapy, he's not really the person to deliver them. He really is just that shallow and, if he’s honest with himself, the main thing he wants in life is to be a hot dumb slut.

Of course, at 36 and newly buff from the gym, that sort of lifestyle is hardly out of reach for him yet, and probably never will be in the way he fears it will. His anxieties about becoming boring are mainly just prompted by hanging out with too many board game-playing lesbians who never want to leave the house. In one of many great pithy one-liners: ‘Lesbians are ageing into sapphic doomsday preppers.’

It’s nice to find some comics relatable, but Sutherland’s material about, for example, your body making new noises as you get older is probably his weakest. What’s interesting about him as a performer is the sense you get that he operates in a rarefied air, with a lifestyle of partying, gay ocean cruises and orgies that feels foreign or inaccessible to most of us.

That’s what I want to hear about: give me the dispatches from a world of experience that’s still really in its infancy – there’s a USP for Sutherland there. Most of our other gay male comedians are a little more cuddly – Sutherland is a shiny, high-performance engine.

When he’s telling narrative stories about his life, the show is at its strongest, partly because the laugh lines evolve organically. It’s hard to put your finger on, but elsewhere in the show his jokes have the tendency to settle into a predictable rhythm. Setup, punchline, inhale as he pauses for the laugh; it feels schematic, which is his biggest pitfall as a comic, the sense that what he’s doing is automatic rather than sincerely felt.

It might just be that the Fringe show format is not the right fit for him. He’s a good comic, sparkling as a palate cleanser and punchy in shorter sets, but this hour runs long and you do start to feel it.

Review date: 15 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square