Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Georgia Polly-Taylor takes a lot of wild stabs in her first solo show, gesturing at some big themes and drawing on some big influences, unfortunately without managing to synthesise anything coherent. 

Wild-eyed and dressed like a Neil Gaiman heroine, she dances around and dips into a silver toilet wearing a feather boa (the toilet is, not Polly-Taylor).  She’s in character as Hot Mess, supposedly an up-and-coming fashionista who’s recently humiliated herself in the public eye by having an IBS attack on the steps of the Met Gala. 

Having set out its stall, the show does very little to engage with its subject. There’s not really any fashion industry satire here; Hot Mess looks and acts like a cross between a clown and a burlesque dancer, and spends most of her time prancing around, rolling around, and pursuing audience interaction to no great ends.

Part of the frustration arises from Polly-Taylor’s habit of throwing in segments without properly developing them either comedically or conceptually. I think the intention is to provide a sort of phantasmagorical effect, but it reads as unfocused. 

For instance, she spends the first 15 minutes of the show as a mime, showing us cue cards that sometimes we’re meant to read out loud and sometimes we’re not – it’s sort of done on a case-by-case basis. Then she switches to biting Frankie Thompson’s lip-sync style for ten minutes, but without any of the collage art or expressive acting that makes Thompson’s stuff so funny. 

Five minutes later it turns out the character can talk after all (so what was the point of the miming, diegetically speaking?) but by this point Polly-Taylor is quickly losing her grip on the fashion world milieu, and in the back half of the show it’s barely mentioned, shafted in favour of extended dance numbers and audience interactions that don’t relate to anything.

The most egregious of these segments is the part where Polly-Taylor reads out ‘dark secrets’ submitted by the audience. This game is becoming very tropey in the world of alternative comedy, and comedians rarely approach the topic with the respect it deserves. 

Julia Masli made it work brilliantly in Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha because she actually listened to what she was told, and made her whole show about engaging with the things she heard honestly, openly and responsively while still getting huge laughs. 

Now obviously not many of Polly-Taylor’s audience members are taking this opportunity to genuinely share their life-ruining secrets, but it still creates a sensation of bruised trust when Hot Mess leverages the notes for very few laughs and then moves on immediately. 

If, as a comedian, you’re not confident about getting a good laugh with the material that’s been provided to you, you at least need to be able to connect to the person who wrote it in a way that feels genuine.

These bugbears aside, there are still solid elements for Polly-Taylor to build on. She brings an effective unhinged quality to her persona, and she’s clearly up for experimentation, she just needs to hone in on the elements that reliably pay off and write some solid material for them. 

At the minute, this burlesque comedy grab-bag works intermittently on the micro scale and not at all on the macro.

• Georgia Polly-Taylor: Very Hot. Very Messy. is on at Underbelly Cowgate at 16:15

Review date: 7 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate