Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

It’s taken five long years for Anna Thomas to go from winning the BBC New Comedy Award to making her Edinburgh Fringe debut. But maybe that’s of little surprise given the Welsh comic does not come across as a woman driven by fierce ambition. 

How To Juggle A Ferret (the title is eventually explained) takes place in a representation of the messy bedroom in her mother’s house, where she still lives, slobbishly and hermit-like, at the age of 32. Isolated from the world, she develops a very peculiar view of it exacerbated by her parent’s own oddness.

The line dividing reality and whimsical extrapolation is blurred. Has her bedroom really been turned into an ad-hoc rhubarb farm? Is she really so obsessed with Wayne Rooney? Yet the chaotic monologue is better when it’s tethered to some objective truth beyond the affectations, such as telling us about her ‘feral’ existence of university or describing how she struggles with the straightforward task of trying to put on a sports bra, which comes with a hilarious mental image.

Thomas’s show is disjointed by design as she breaks off for random thoughts, the occasional odd animal fact, or crude home-made animations. Some of these are great – you will never unsee the disconcerting portrait she reveals, which comes with a fabulous punchline – while other digressions seem self-indulgent.  Later it emerges that there may be good reason she is so readily distracted, though the scattergun approach can be frustrating to watch.

Fortunately, Thomas is a warm, endearing presence, whose quirks are an integral part of that gently ditzy personality, making the audience more than willing to indulge her stream of strangeness. Nonetheless, the hour would surely benefit from more coherence, if that could be achieved without sanding down the eccentricities that make her off-kilter jokes work.

That said, the 40-minute serious bit which explains much about her personality feels a little too much like a formula being followed, despite its obvious sincerity. Or maybe because of it, given its clear contrast with the esoteric flightiness of the rest of the hour.

Look out too for an early visual gag, with the briefest of cameos executed by a lad who – Chortle can reveal – is Micky Flanagan’s son Max (at least it was the day we were in). Nepotism really rules in this industry.

Review date: 13 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cabaret Voltaire)