Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

America’s Got Talent silver medallist Chris Turner has a very specific set of skills, the use of which he lays out at the top of the show. In this hour, he asks you your name and something that you like to do, and then will instantaneously rap for about two minutes straight, incorporating full observational stand-up routines into the song as he rhymes.

It’s difficult to explain how impressive this is when you see it for the first time. Indeed, it feels like we’re leaving the realms of ‘talent’ behind and trespassing in the field of magic powers. 

Freestyling has always been mad in and of itself, but to do a very serviceable point-blank comedy routine on puttanesca sauce at the same time, in a complex rhyme scheme, with not even a slight hesitation, error or trip? There’s not even a sense that he’s falling back on established patterns or jokes like, for example, Jimmy Carr does in his crowdwork – every freestyle seems to fall out of the sky.

Fascinatingly, he also keeps a small stack of jokes on notecards that he performs non-musically between freestyles. At one point, an audience member getting carried away with the format shouts that he should ‘do one about pigeons’. ‘I haven’t written one about pigeons,’ says Turner, slightly peevishly. What do you mean you haven’t written a routine, Chris?? If he asked you to rap it, you’d do it without a moment’s hesitation, but you couldn’t simply speak it? What part of your brain is this stuff even coming from?

After demonstrating his skills a few times, there is a need to shake things up, and Turner is able to throw a few new elements into the mix. In one section, he sends an audience member out of the room so that his friends can dish on his shortcomings for a one-sided rap battle. Elsewhere, he shows he can do it in different accents, or in the styles of different rappers.

Ultimately it’s a form of improvisation, and runs into the same issues as many improv shows –  that none of it means anything, and the comedy is not spectacular in its own right; it’s just amazing that it comes out of him in that specific way. At the centre of it all, Turner is an affable but anonymous figure – you almost want his eyes to roll back in his head as he channels the freestyle.

If you want to see someone do this particular thing, there’s probably no one better in the world. Whether you’ll remember any of it five minutes later is another matter.

Review date: 26 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square