Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Rob Duncan’s long-gestating solo show Printer Of The Year may be niche in the extreme, as he’s willing to admit, but it’s also one of the most brilliant and original pieces of clowning that the Fringe has seen in many years.

Opening the show in a tuxedo and balancing a wig on his head, Duncan gives us some of the context that informs this hour: he and his brother Andy started performing together in the 2010s before quickly meeting the Estonian clown Julia Masli. As a trio, they had a smash hit with their dadaist clown show Legs and its sequel Logs, before Julia went solo to great acclaim, eventually touring the world with her show Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The Duncan Brothers, meanwhile, collaborated on a couple more shows together, but Andy eventually decided to move to Hollywood to pursue a career in film and have a baby.

Meanwhile, here lies Rob, feeling left behind and experiencing mixed emotions towards his erstwhile creative partner, going through a tough year at home with not much to show for it. Well, he might as well celebrate the things he does have. When he’s not clowning, Duncan spends his time as a professional printer, a career for which he won Printer of the Year in the 2024 Printweek Awards.

All these elements and feelings come together in a vulnerable but extremely silly concept from Duncan. Leveraging his professional prestige, he’s decided to deliver an informative seminar on printing alongside his new comedy partner: upwards of eight printers of varying vintages that are gradually introduced to the stage throughout the show.

I’ve struggled to describe Duncan’s unique stage presence on a number of occasions. Extremely tall and stiff, he stands ramrod straight, smiling broadly and speaks very loudly in an odd, halting style, as if pausing to allow a translator to catch up. There’s something of an old-fashioned headmaster to him, especially when he frequently lapses into a call-and-response format with the audience.

‘Who am I?’

[in unison] ‘Rob Duncan.’

‘Why are we proud of me?’

[in unison] ‘Printer of the Year 2024.’

After taking us on a brief tour of the history of printing, and describing in detail his favourite industrial printer the Heidelberg Speedmaster XL105 (whose name I know because I bought a T-shirt with it on after the show), Duncan introduces us to his printers, who are soon crowding the stage, each trying to get their own routines started by printing out various phrases to capture the attention of the crowd. It’s sort of the same joke over and over again, but it is never not funny when Duncan is in the middle of a monologue and one of his printers starts chugging away to laboriously produce a single word. 

The comedy attacks different people at different times. At any given moment, there is at least one member of the audience who has completely lost control and is giggling away to themselves continually.

Duncan achieves this without traditional joke structures by setting up a huge array of little physical gags that roll chaotically into one another, like when his hat unexpectedly prints out a small picture of a dog several minutes after the opportune moment has passed, or when his wig finally falls on the floor only for Duncan to produce an identical replacement from his breast pocket.

All of this Tati-esque Wrestling with machinery would be sublime enough as it is, but in Duncan’s show it takes on an added element of pathos. He rarely mentions his brother or his own life directly, but it comes in every now and again to remind us that these feelings underpin the whole show, and that this exquisite farce is a genuine artistic expression of things that are almost too difficult to say with words.

Review date: 29 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Underbelly Bristo Square