Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

When Leo Hincks entered the Chortle Student Comedy Award in 2024, at the age of 22, and received his first journalistic write-up, the praise that was heaped on him was balanced out by a sticky comparison: his only drawback as a performer was that he was so much like his namesake Leo Reich. ‘That’s homophobic!’ jokes Hincks, which is embarrassing for me because, up until he told that story, I’d been thinking god this guy is so similar to Leo Reich… they even have the same name!

New comics often wear their influences on their sleeves, but it’s rare for one of them to be so similar to an established comedian that it becomes a major plot point of his debut show. 

To be clear, it doesn’t seem like a deliberate cribbing on Hincks’ part, just that both comedians happen to nail the same particular strand of camp, self-obsessed Gen Z melodrama. The fact that they look so similar and share the same first name as well as many of their mannerisms I think we can also take as coincidental, and there’s clearly no hard feelings from Reich, who cameos in voicenote form during Hincks’ hour.

He’s not the only one, as Hincks spends altogether too much of this show being kicked around by the audio files of his own mind. The first third is great – Hincks instantly so confident on stage, toxically charismatic and very funny, positioning himself as a frustrated actor who’s been forced into the stand-up pen. ‘My therapist says I became a stand-up because I was never nominated for the ice bucket challenge,’ he says, dramatically wiping away a tear.

After that though, he starts to lose his grip on things. His character is utterly obsessed with how he’s perceived and his desire to be famous, gilding the edge of the yawning void at the centre of his personality. 

Whether it’s Hincks or the character he’s playing or some point between the two, we never find out anything substantive about him, just that he can’t stop thinking about how people think about him. He says he wants to be in the movies, but it’s only so he can post about it online and make people jealous. It’s a decent satirical mode in which to operate, but it leaves the character feeling shallow, in the sense both that it’s his personality trait, and that he doesn’t have any others.

In the last third, with Hincks now submerged in many levels of theatrical reality and cosplaying as a ‘serious actor’ version of himself, the whole thing has really fallen to pieces. The performer is writhing and being tormented by endless voicenotes, all thoughts of jokes seemingly left by the wayside. It’s hard to think of a show this year that starts so strong before disappearing so thoroughly up its own arse.

Self-aware as always, Hincks shouts at the end ‘[all I’ve experienced is] my phone, school and uni! It’s not a lot to pull on, okay?’ which is a fair point in its way, but maybe indicates he should have left it a little longer to debut. And with Reich having seemingly exhausted his stand-up impulses after a single show, the field might get a little clearer too.

Review date: 29 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot