Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

He’s camp, effusive, and quite bitchy – a bit Noël Coward if he says so himself – so you know exactly where you are with Dom McGovern, a gregarious comedian who immediately establishes himself as the audience’s pithy gay best friend.

It’s soon clear, however, that the prime target for his withering queer eye is his own reflection, given he suffers from body dysmorphia. Even then he calls the condition ‘the most arrogant mental illness you can self-diagnose’, determined to remain arch even about the one thing that has been so destructive in his life.

How he developed it, he ascribes partly to generational Catholic guilt, partly to it being ‘inherited’ from a judgemental (but in many ways progressive) mother, and partly to growing up in the noughties surrounded by messages such as Kate Moss’s ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ and the proclamations of pooh-prodding ‘doctor’ Gillian McKeith. 

Taking the mickey out of the bizarre pseudoscience of this fake medic is nothing new, nor is the observation that Jesus is always portrayed as being pretty hench. But McGovern prides himself on taking deep dives beyond the headline gags. It’s not 100 per cent certain he goes that deep, but the audience is so buoyed on the energy of his fast-moving monologue, it doesn’t much matter.

With some very silly asides about the likes of Jedward, Prize Hog is never going to be too sincere. McGovern manages to convey the reality of his situation without any cost to the joke rate. He creates raucous rolling laughter around the serious topic, without ever feeling the need to kill the momentum for an emotional sucker-punch.

He mocks his illness with the same vim he tackles awful men into rock climbing or his even more awful therapist, part of a recovery programme that also involved him being the only man in his therapy group. 

He was even more out of place among 1,500 chiselled Brazilians on a Rio beach. But not one of them could produce a Fringe debut as entertaining as this. 

Review date: 21 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard