Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

The terrible state of the world and the faltering repair of his body continue to be comedic gifts for Matt Forde. They are hard-earned ones, certainly, with the cancer that almost killed him having a high chance of returning. Meanwhile, the horrors playing out internationally are supplemented by everyone's broader feelings of general disappointment in the lacklustre Labour government.

You may not agree with Forde's politics, but as stand-ups go, he's open and succinct in expressing them, sharing his support for the government's unpopular planned cuts to the winter fuel allowance, arguing that the move itself was necessary. It was just the presentation of the policy, the storytelling, that was so severely lacking, he says.

As a centrist pragmatist, you're left in no doubt that Forde would prefer a world without Nigel Farage or Donald Trump at the levers of power. More so a world in which he could summon an erection unaided. Still, he's grimly amused by the toxic populists and he's damned if he's not going to share that amusement.

Having joined the ranks of disabled comedians, Forde retains erectile dysfunction, a side-effect of his cancer surgery, and he doesn't flinch from discussing it in graphic detail, removing its emasculating taint.

From the ridiculousness of the NHS striving to turn him on, to the rationing of his medication putting a strain on his marriage, Forde appreciates the dreadful hand he's been dealt and turns it to his advantage.

The visuals of him blindfolded, trousers round ankles, being tested for sensitivity in his genitals, or inserting himself into a machine to get himself match fit for lovemaking… well, you wouldn't wish it on anyone but someone with an Edinburgh Fringe show to write. The disparities between carefully managing health and spontaneously awakening lust are mined for hilarious pathos.

Capably though, Forde links his personal travails to the broader malaise afflicting the country. There's undoubtedly medical justification in retaining a positive outlook, whatever illnesses befall you. And he criticises the clinical Keir Starmer for the dreariness and pessimism communicating his tough medicine, maintaining that he'd have preferred Farage or Trump as his surgeon, bullshitting the patient obviously but unimpeded by facts in their can-do bluster.

The show opens with him predicting a Farage Premiership, noting Reform’s influence upon the current administration but ultimately pillorying the nasty politics of the party with surgical analysis of their more hateful rhetoric and the mad statements of Lee Anderson, a bluff moron so incongruous in a seat of power that he essentially satirises himself.

Forde holds Trump back as long as he can. But he and we appreciate that the American president is box office for an impressionist. In a show in which Forde only really indulges himself with a throwback snatch of uncharacteristically hagiographic Gordon Brown, the comic is judiciously sparing with his mimicry.

His appreciation of Starmer's skills as a global statesman, in influencing the US leader by playing to his ego and vanity, are the motivation for Forde recreating the recent passing of the state visit invitation to the president in the Oval Office. But it's the weak-willed, self-satisfaction of the most powerful man in the world and his outsize grotesqueness that's the draw. Forde absolutely skewers him physically and intellectually.

By comparison, I'm not sure that his Angela Rayner isn't too much of a caricature and patronisingly dewy-eyed. Yet in aligning UK politics with Oasis’s beef with Edinburgh City Council over the staging of their recent Murrayfield gigs, Forde is surely correct in advocating for some big message – unapologetic appeals to optimism over awkward details, some of that Cool Britannia, New Labour sheen.

And yes, the shine of the Blair years more-or-less disappeared with the Iraq War, as surely as Forde's beatific inner calm eventually left him after he survived cancer. 

But as much as politics needs scrutiny, from a greater number of satirists, people need hope and functioning penises, neither of which he anticipates surviving a Farage administration. Cometh the hour of darkness, cometh Matt Forde.

Review date: 19 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard