Review by Jay Richardson

With ongoing hostilities in Iran and the fire that recently swept the exterior of nearby Central Station, comics such as Rosco McClelland and Connor Burns opened their sets at this annual showcase of the city’s humour with bleakly gallows quips.

Times are tough. And GICF festival director Krista MacDonald employed her platform, introducing the Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award to implore arts funding bodies to belatedly help out the live comedy sector.

No one’s holding their breath for that coming before World War III, though. And so the gala, effectively bringing the curtain down on this year’s festival, front-loaded its bill with established mainstays of Scottish comedy.

Social club cabaret duo Almost Angelic, aka Karen Dunbar (pictured) and Tom Urie, are freshly resurgent, with changes to music licensing rules meaning that their classic clips are now free to find a whole new audience online.

With glorified and blowsily overblown karaoke – tinged with the characters’ bickering marital tension and Dunbar’s clownish but commanding stage presence  – they kicked the afternoon off with real energy, batting eyelashes at nostalgic sentimentality but never wholly succumbing to it.

Similarly, Des Clarke is best known these days as a breakfast radio DJ and roving reporter on wholesome community projects for The One Show. But his stand-up kicks against such cosy characterisation, recalling his upbringing in the high-rise flats of the Gorbals, revelling in stereotypes of rampant drug use and low life expectancy. 

His smooth, broadcaster’s speed of delivery and playful cynicism trod an expert line between pride and cringe about the Commonwealth Games’ return and Scots’ representation on television.

After a long, distinguished career, Fred MacAulay has gone up in the world, residing in the same posh village as Michelle Mone. But his instinct is to enact revenge on the disgraced peer on behalf of taxpayers. The veteran, clubbable comic retains his keen everyman instincts, having great, scurrilous fun at former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s expense. So it scarcely matters that he’s got almost nothing on her successors, Humza Yousaf and John Swinney.

Ever the polished pro, in his five or so minutes he dusts off his viral football routine from Mock The Week and crowbars in a plug for an upcoming live reunion with his former double act partner and ex-player Ally McCoist. After his recent cancer diagnosis, it's cheering to see MacAulay looking so fit and vital, the material punchy and to the point.

Sandwiched between him and Clarke was the bill’s wildcard, Susan Riddell, anecdotal stand-up with ditzy, girl-next-door energy. Or cause-driven domestic ‘terrorist’?

There are limits to what she can say about last year’s incident in which she rammed a van into the fence of an Edinburgh weapons factory. But she makes a virtue of having to caveat her account with clunky ‘allegedlies’, even as her account is backed up with audio and visual evidence.

She’s been proscribed as a threat to the public, meaning she’s barred from Edinburgh and curfewed after 7pm, a considerable imposition for a stand-up. But that’s as nothing compared to the crimp on her dating. 

Riddell cannily focuses on the texts she exchanged with one bewildered suitor in the immediate aftermath of her arrest, entertainingly exploiting the gap between their cute, stumbling flirtation and her status as a monitored security concern. And while focusing on the ludicrousness of her personal situation, she took the opportunity to seek donations for Gazan families.

This gala also platforms newer acts. And the challenge of playing a big room such as the King’s Theatre was one Amanda Dwyer rose to. 

Riddell’s co-podcaster is a gentle, inhibited-seeming performer who admits to mental health struggles and a failed marriage, even if she announces the latter in a contradictory manner about who ditched whom. Yet her background as a Govan high school teacher implies an inner steeliness. And her unhurried delivery compels you to lean in, something she abuses with impish crowd manipulation as she reflects on the intimate consequences of waxing and childbirth.

Even newer, and a recent graduate from one of the festival’s comedy courses for women and non-binary acts, Ifrah Qureshi is an act of considerable promise as well. The middle daughter of a high-achieving Pakistani family, she makes astute if purposefully overreaching parallels between her job in IT and her sisters being doctors, all the while mischievously playing with racial stereotypes.

These stretch to a 9/11 gag that doesn’t feel especially gratuitous. And her sister’s mixed-race wedding becomes a potent setting for her to teasingly test preconceptions about white-brown and Scottish-English relations.

Finally, fast-rising Connor Burns took the show into the break, delivering a tight, lean set, dripping with insincerity that earned him a raucous reaction. Bemoaning all the conflict in the world, just as his career is accelerating, he cries crocodile tears for expats stuck in Dubai while the US hammers Iran, and complains that his American fiancee is no longer the fashionable accessory she once was.

With her being a criminal defence lawyer, working with some of Scotland’s most distinctively gutter-poetic criminal underclass, he’s been forced into the role of ‘radge-speak’ translator. And after some demanding lexical interpretations, for an easier life he now just finds it simpler to lie. There are unquestionably more inventive, nuanced stand-ups around. But Burns really knows his audience and smashed his slot.

Post-break, compere Susie McCabe offered some well-observed thoughts on the different aspirational horizons for various generations, some gleeful pokes at Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s recent difficulties and the upsides to her recent divorce, casting herself as gay royalty back on the sexual prowl.

Returning solo, Karen Dunbar similarly burnished her credentials, semi-ironically proclaiming herself a national treasure, icon and Bafta-winner, without disclosing that the latter came from voicing a computer game. No snobbery about this here though. She could coast on goodwill for her peerless sketch résumé. But Dunbar has arrived at stand-up late in life, a potential faceplant for someone of her status in this part of the world.

Happily, although she races through her set with intensity, rarely pausing long enough to allow a line to stand on its own merit, the pace of delivery and cumulative, chaotic effect really suits her tale of adolescent misadventures with alcohol. 

Conjuring a vivid picture of her younger self succumbing to drink at a working men’s club in her native Ayr, she allows just a dash of sentimentality for the late older sister who both corrupted and saved her. The impact of the tale is cemented with the wide-eyed, gurning expressiveness of Dunbar’s features, in absolute mastery of her heady account of self-recrimination and salvation snatched from impending parental punishment.

If there’s a holy trinity of hack impressions, it’s surely Donald Trump, David Attenborough and Gollum. Relative newcomer Jack Brookmyre also offers a variation on physical resemblance to Harry Potter to introduce himself. But what he superficially lacks in originality, the self-described ‘geeky wee guy’ makes up for in solid execution. And he’s not bereft of surprises, applying Gollum’s mood swings to Glasgow’s incoherent, cheek-by-jowl city planning. 

Notwithstanding a tale of woe regarding his nebbish casting in an Irn-Bru advert, he’s already got impressive confidence. And there’s enough here to suggest a creativity beyond straightforward crowdpleasing.

Stuart Mitchell’s at a fascinating moment. Hard graft, entrepreneurial spirit and a focused eye for what works have made him the best-selling live act of any entertainment genre in Glasgow in recent times, leaving megastar musical acts in his wake. 

But he needs to downplay his success, lest he seem out of touch. So he carps about being overlooked for Two Doors Down. And he affects rampant jealousy at the multi-faceted portfolio of McFly singer and Paddington The Musical creator Tom Fletcher, a lot of setup for Mitchell to nail some admittedly fine gags about immigration tensions and the former Prince Andrew.

It would be trite to suggest Mitchell hasn’t forgotten where he came from as he sells out multiple dates at the 3000-seater SEC Armadillo down the road. Endearingly though, his play for sympathy about becoming an adult orphan, found an audience response at a tough gig  that could best be described as brutally putting him in his place. The sort of hard, folk humour that everyone wants to hear and savour.

Mhairi Black continues to be known as a politician-turned-stand-up but the balance is steadily shifting. The ex-deputy leader of the SNP in Westminster is a natural storyteller, increasingly composed and unruffled on stage. And she’s got anecdotes from her former life that are equal parts rich in self-deprecation and genuinely interesting.

If all are tinged with regret that principles can’t sustain in British politics while populist conmen such as Nigel Farage thrive, who doesn’t hope to hear about counting votes from ballots scrawled with juvenile bellends? 

It’s a more complicated and critical a process than you might imagine, with amusing details reiterating a flawed democratic process. But the ferocity with which Black once chased those dubious votes has been channelled into an open desire to make it as a comic. And she’s flourishing.

Closing out the show was last year’s Spirit of Sir Billy Connolly-winner McClelland, fondly luxuriating in his triumph but only as a scene-setting lament for getting called up to fight in a global conflict. Though somewhat fatalistic, he’s got pre-conditions about participating in the looming shitshow.

Currently though, he’s more concerned with taking the piss, literally extracting a sample from his ageing, ailing dog, making mishaps that resemble a Taskmaster task gone spectacularly awry. McClelland might set himself up as a fool, albeit one who’s increasingly aware of his foolishness as he enters middle age, but with his quirky observational instincts, he’s more accurately trying, and, to a great extent, succeeding, in casting himself as an idiot savant.

After he departed, it was once again left to Connolly, via pre-recorded video from his home in Florida, to congratulate a visibly overcome Dwyer at becoming the latest winner of the prize bearing his name. 

Enthusing that her knowledge of bumholes exceeds his own, that’s no mean shout for someone who’s had prostate cancer and so memorably bared his backside for Comic Relief.

• All photos © Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

Review date: 30 Mar 2026
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Glasgow King's Theatre