Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Robin Grainger has increasingly built his comedic brand on positivity in the face of adversity – and he's ever more leaning into it. He's found a groove of solid, ultimately feelgood storytelling that works for him, with his tales of growing up in a remote village 50 miles north of Aberdeen especially resonant for Scottish audiences.

However, that rather damns with faint praise his universal affability, easy warmth and, dare I say, quite a bit of sympathetic, beta male energy that makes you really want the best for him. The weedy, creepy voice he deploys to signal his goblin-like wretchedness is reminiscent of that used by his compatriot Des Clarke, but it's undeniably effective.

And really, what, in the final reckoning, is more important than trying to find happiness? You'd be mad to not make it your life's work and your working life.

The flipside is that you can overreach in forever seeking the sunny side up to an anecdote. Or drain the well of serviceable tales to the dregs. Besides, an instinctive Pollyannaish attitude threatens to make you blind to the nastier aspects of humanity that are so fun to indulge.

So Grainger has qualified and applied caveats to his joys, his pleasure in his mature moustache of five days’ growth is tempered by its social signifier as untrustworthy. More generally, how much of his physical appearance has he consciously or sub-consciously sabotaged in order to give himself jokes about looking like a paedophile?

It isn't groundbreaking to suggest that the selves people share on Instagram don't reflect true levels of contentment and may even contradict them. Yet in the idea of a snapshot, Grainger is surely right in extolling the notion that happiness can only ever be fleeting.

This may seem obvious. But elsewhere he makes a persuasive case for how one uses Sellotape as a reflection of mental health. And he draws a cultural distinction between Britain and America in our stock responses to routine enquiries about someone's well-being. Though hardly the first to make this kind of comparison, there's a robust truth to it, and it speaks to differing horizons of expectations and privilege.

His own expectations were established growing up in his tiny fishing community. But he reinforces his feelings of alienation by sharing that his brother was the favourite child, the basis for a neat switcheroo gag that also then establishes the defining tragedy in his life.

Mind you, the dog lover had previously had a traumatic introduction to mortality through his pets and his plain-speaking grandmother. So he shrugs and simply ventures that his family was mental, so he's mental too, while also affording an explanation for the astronomic vet's bills he's grudgingly willing to accept.

He portrays a closed community in the grip of alcohol and Valium, comically under-resourced and underfunded, where psychological healthcare was a glossed-over, unspoken joke. Yet perhaps preferable to the male epidemics of loneliness and toxicity today, only palatable for discussion and treatment if given a swaggering macho sheen.

Grainer isn't so without malice that he can't recall his mother's misguided Christmas presents for the comedy fans in her life, allowing him little pops at the decline of Ricky Gervais and Graham Linehan, the benefit of hindsight confirming his adolescent intuition that something was awry.

An account of a local teenage talent show is touchingly naff but doesn't quite have the requisite sting of humiliation to justify its inclusion. While his feigned fury with body scrub is pretty workaday observational material.

Still, having recently achieved his dream and become a full-time comic, Grainger can afford to look back on his open mike struggles with a certain degree of fondness rather than PTSD.

Plenty of Scottish comics have routines about doing prison gigs. Yet his closing tale has the virtue of featuring the recently passed Paul Sneddon, growling his incredulity at what he was witnessing –  and a truly spectacular misjudgement and recovery from Grainger that showed he had the right stuff to make a living from stand-up.

Review date: 10 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Assembly George Square