Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Sam Morrison is a very LA comedian: glossy, self-obsessed but self-aware, trenchant but kind of Hollyweird. It’s hard to imagine him wearing a heavy coat. 

Duck is his fourth solo show, and follows the success of Sugar Daddy, which had a strong, personal narrative behind it. Even without having caught that one, you can sense that Duck is Morrison in more of a finger buffet mode, composing his show from assorted short anecdotes and a wobbly hand on the jar labelled ‘animal facts’.

Proceeding roughly chronologically, he catalogues his childhood and his early romantic history, with particular attention paid to coming out to his best friend, and his pattern of being attracted to older, overweight patriarchs – first his rabbi, then his dance professor, and eventually his much older boyfriend, whose early death was at the centre of Sugar Daddy.

Meanwhile, his animal facts eventually coalesce into a loose theme around evolutionary science, which he uses to provocatively wonder about ‘why’ he is gay and what purpose homosexuality serves, and in particular, what gay men are aesthetically optimising for if not to demonstrate their procreative viability. In one of his best bits, he talks about the ‘pointlessness’ of being muscular in an evolutionary context where muscles seem outmoded.

It’s an interesting, discursive show, held together by some sharp, acidic writing that draws on the comedic traditions of his heritage as a Jew and a gay man while keeping them up to date, sometimes in a way that forces the audience to keep up. On accidentally bumping into his therapist at a ‘gay funeral ’, he tells his friend ‘you can’t be a therapist and a top – they weed that out of you at grad school.’

Perhaps it’s unfair to diagnose a b-side show without having seen the a-side, but there’s a definite sense of odds and ends to this narrative. His skill, his writing and the pleasure of his company is inarguable, all the same.

Review date: 16 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot