Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

From the damp, dark corners of Paul Hilleard’s enquiring mind emerge moving questions like, ‘Are worms wriggling in ecstasy or agony?’ Trouble is, if you walked into Grogg optimistically opting for ecstasy, you might leave suspecting they’re in agony after all. 

Paul Hilleard grew up in Pontypridd in the South Wales Valleys and now performs on the Bristol comedy circuit, won the BBC New Comedy Award in 2024, was a finalist for Channel 4’s Sean Lock Comedy Award the following year and has been named one of Chortle’s 2026 Hotshots. This is his debut Fringe hour, in which his hulking presence lends weight to accepting social commentary filtered through a wayward imagination.

He avoids drawing a simple divide between the working and middle classes. If you don’t own a private island, he says, you’re not the problem. Instead, a healthy helping of institutional mistrust runs throughout. And he’s got a point. Hilleard asks. ‘Is anyone in therapy?’ Nobody raises a hand. He asks again, to the same silence. Then, ‘Did anyone used to be in therapy but isn’t any more because they can’t afford it?’ At least a quarter of the room erupts into cheers.

Hilleard suggests that human connection: finding a way to hug your dad, or even your polyamorous girlfriend’s husband, might offer some route out of the mess.

Leaning intimately over the microphone with a discomfiting stare, Hilleard maps his working-class beginnings and his move to Bristol, directed by failed liaisons with middle-class girls and ‘salaried hippies’. 

An off-mic imagining of dinnertime in a miner’s cottage during the strikes is brilliant without being sentimental. Hilleard is funniest when observing local communities, tenderly illuminating how societal failures work their way into private lives with tumultuous consequences. 

Review date: 13 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Lauren Sneade
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club