Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Bella Hull starts her Fringe show with some brief,  intense and intimidating crowd work, targeting audience members who’d feel most awkward, just to establish dominance.

It’s the opening of an excellent bit of business, which I can tell you nothing about without spoiling it, but sets out the 28-year-old’s stall as a comic with a sense of humour that’s both dark and roguish.

She says that when she first got into comedy, she had visions of being a literate, intelligent artist expressing her soul through lyrical wit. She was, after all, a schoolgirl poetry champion. But in adulthood her more earthy sensibilities put paid to that, and instead she tells morally dubious gags in shady basements across the UK. You can’t knock it, as the hard yards on the comedy circuit landed her memorable bookings on Have I Got News For You.

While Hull plays down her smartness, it takes a unique thought process to come up with gags such as the priceless one-liner about a classic British sitcom that will long stick in your mind. You can see why she earned her place on the Saturday Night Live UK writing team.

Sometimes a purely daft pun will be thrown into the monologue about her life, but more typical might be a line in which she evokes, say, Isis bride Shamim Begum, but with a sense of mischief – inappropriate, yes, but never gratuitous edgelord territory.

We hear about her odd family background, life on the dating apps, fear of exposing her real personality to any boyfriend, and the problems of living with her flatmates in ant-infested accommodation. She makes a joke about some of this hardly being virgin comedy ground, but her take is never trite, mainly as she’s steely and cynical beneath her inscrutable exterior.

Hull describes herself as an emotional terrorist, defined as someone who psychologically manipulates those around them to control them, which is surely overstating the case, but on a lower level it’s clear she likes messing around with people, audiences included, playing around the edge of their comfort zone, as that opening exchange demonstrated.

Review date: 12 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club