Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

The compere’s cliché  is to tell audiences of comedy competitions just how hard it is for the act going on first – but not if you’re as good as Joshua Khoury, who opened last night’s So You Think You’re Funny? final, and proved unbeatable.

He secured his place here as part of his prize for winning Australia's similar Raw Comedy competition, and now adds this to his trophy cabinet too.

He channels his compatriot Sam Campbell a little too closely in his cadences, but his 'I'm not in my right mind' brand of offbeat observational comedy is expertly written. He explicitly emphasises his weirdness a lot, though he barely has to as the delightfully quirky joke-writing speaks for itself with a great ear for phrase-making and great eye for comic detail. 

Up next, Naph’s inexperience showed in her deadpan, standing rigid and gripping the microphone tight. A Pakistani hijabi comic, she has some quite edgy lines playing into the stereotypes of being part of a strict, large Muslim family. 

Talking about the Jeremy Kyle show seven years after it was cancelled feels dated, but she has some distinctive material about being an Islamic ‘Karen’ or finding herself accidentally attending a Reform conference at the venue where she works. It all shows plenty of promise, which will come into its own once she feels more at ease on stage,

Matilda Humphreys is much more at ease in the spotlight, with a mature writing that is by turns silly, cynical and sexual. She tells us straight off the bat that she is taking testosterone for medical reasons, which helps emasculate her boyfriend. Depicting men more generally as being very basic creatures seems deeply ingrained, and is a solid source of withering humour, while dealing with a grandmother with Alzheimer’s offers another fruitful strand for this comic who sees through the bullshit.

‘Vegan John Wick’ Chris Byfield had a bumpier set. ‘Japanese guys with dreadlocks’ seems too specific a reference that few in his audience might immediately recognise, with his way in to it provided by talking about his super-smart Japanese girlfriend. And a routine about fat statues is rather too convoluted for too little pay-off. He’s a relaxed performer, who can be darkly cheeky about his crematorium-owning father profiting from the Covid pandemic, but the writing is too hit-and-miss.

Sarah Dungworth is smiley and confident, a career in teaching making her at home in addressing a crowd. However she’s a bit too comfortable on stage as she doesn’t show much impetus to land on unexpected punchlines as she chats amiably about being childless. She also talks a lot about dating on the apps, Bumble specifically, and the humourless men she encounters, but their genuine responses aren’t enough to sustain the set.

Bobby Jethro’s most apparent trait is his stammer, though he serves up a couple of misdirections about being bearded and from Bradford before we get to talk about it. His first gag about his speech disability is a great one, before moving on to more pedestrian fare about unsuitable jobs he could be doing, but delivered with good cheer. His stammer, of course, can affect the timing of gags - but he largely made it work in his favour in the numerous occasions when he takes a left turn and the routine heads to an unexpected place. It all landed him the runner-up place.

There’s quite a lot going on with Victoria Blunt. The headline is that she’s a reformed party girl now seeking enlightenment through a simpler, ego-free Buddhist lifestyle. Though that’s rather at odds with her enthusiastic take-up of beauty treatments. Oh, and then there’s the deafness to talk about too, as well as her unsuccessful acting career. All this rather over-eggs her seven minutes, which could benefit from more focus, but she’s a vivacious presence and having too much to talk about is a nice problem to have.

Lucas Jones Ho’s half-Welsh, half-Chinese heritage gives him plenty to draw upon, not least his attempts to reclaim a slur that doesn’t quite have the same potential for edgy, angry reversal of the n-word. Nerves appeared to get the better of him as he fumbled a crucial segment, which obviously suffered from having its components told in the wrong order but he still remains a newcomer with substantial potential – as reflected in him sharing the bronze tonight.

He shared that position with Sarah Lewis. There’s a brilliant premise at the heart of her routine: that while she welcomes men’s growing emotional intelligence, it doesn’t half put the pressure on women who could previously have assumed they would have the monopoly on this aspect of a relationship with very little effort. However, she found it difficult to mould jokes from this, and the set felt a little too much like it was setting out a thesis. Once she can add gags to such original thought she'll be a force to be recokned with, but at the moment they are in relatively short supply.  

Omar Bouzad provided just the sort of high energy needed at the end of a long gig, but his writing was under-ambitious. He started decently with opener about the similarity between lesbians and suicide bombers and a solid gender pun,  but riffs on the middle class, being from a large family and fiddling with the TV arial failed to excite.

Review date: 28 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot