Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Glenn Moore opens the spigot on his latest harried torrent of jokes before he’s even arrived on stage, relaying a well-known story about Emma Thompson losing her script for Sense & Sensibility in a computer crash and having it saved by Stephen Fry after she brought her entire desktop across town. Does Moore want to be a striver like Thompson, never giving up, or does he want to be lazy and coast by on what life gives him?

This is (I think?) the central question animating the show, but more than with any other comedian, it doesn’t matter at all. Moore’s sets always have some kind of central story or thematic throughline and it always gets lost, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, he proceeds at such an insane pace and with such constant diversions into ancillary jokes, it’s impossible to hold the central thread. Even towards the end of the hour, he’ll say something like ‘so there I was in the car with Benji’ and the immediate response is hang on, who’s Benji / where’s this car / was I supposed to be keeping track of this?

Secondly, any attempt to invest in this situation is stymied by the fact that it’s not real, none of this is real, Benji isn’t real and the car isn’t real. There’s no point following this story because even Moore himself is only pretending that it’s important – it exists as nothing more than a series of hooks to hang his jokes on. For all his talent, the man is not great on storytelling.

He’s such a great writer of classical jokes: puns, one-liners, pull-back-and-reveals; it feels like he’d be more comfortable working in the vein of Gary Delaney or Milton Jones. Instead, recognising his natural propensity towards being ‘robotic and relentless’ he uses the throughline to try to create emotional investment. 

In this show, that means performing distress as he wrestles with the existential question he’s set himself, so tonally he gets more and more agitated and angry throughout the hour. It’s never exactly emotive, for the reasons mentioned above, but it certainly fills the room with a stressful atmosphere.

Apologies to Moore for spending too much of this review harping on the structure rather than the jokes which are his true life’s work. It wouldn’t make sense to spoil them when surprise is the whole point, but this is a good batch. There’s nothing with the sublime harmony of his best set, 2022’s Will You Still Need Me Will You Still Feed Me Glenn I’m Sixty Moore, but plenty of lovely bits nonetheless. 

Between jokes, the air tends to escape very quickly out of the room; he’s a comedian who’s all about short sharp peaks of hilarity. If he chilled out his delivery a bit and strung together his best gags without worrying about the story, he’d probably be a national treasure on the level of Tim Vine.

Review date: 17 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard