Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

‘Who would be a 39-year-old comedian?’ asks Alfie Brown. He’s too old to be a digital native, building an audience on the socials; too young to have already made a packet on DVD sales. 

But he needs to make a comeback following his (excellent) mea culpa show post-cancellation, so he slaps on his clown costume – literally for the first few minutes – to try to generate some short-form content to rack up those likes and subscribes.

Maybe he can engineer a viral crowd work clip, reducing the paying audience to ‘extras in his content’, as he puts it – or maybe he can do a short routine about one of the topics the algorithm suggests will go well: dogs, porn,Trump or parenting.

Of course, the joke is that Brown’s knotty, nuanced stand-up is ill-suited for social media – and ultimately this show becomes a celebration of an intimate live performance that allows for context, subtlety and irony and so makes for a more rewarding exchange of ideas. 

As a comic who thrives on being on the back foot, however, Brown clearly wonders if his brand of intelligent discourse can ever compete with moronic entertainment – as embodied by the dead-eyed chants of ‘take it off’ on The Masked Singer that even his own children have fallen victim to.

At his best, Brown is sublime, and there are some prestige routines here, including a puberty blocker joke that causes frisson in the set-up but is ultimately non-offensive and a great takedown of XL Bullies and their owners. Meanwhile, a routine about not being able to do the Armenian accent speaks to the often misguided nature of knee-jerk offence – making an excellent point while being designed to provoke the woke Edinburgh audience.

Yet this show struggles to build momentum with Brown’s performance, at least at this late stage in the Fringe, having too little energy.

His contrarian ways come out when he suggests good reasons for us to admire Donald Trump, but the sarcasm doesn’t sustain much depth, ’This is the weakest bit of the show,’ he surmises, correctly, doing the critic’s job for us. He does like to run a meta-commentary on the gig, highlighting crowd responses and, yes, the reviewer in the room.

The Trump chunk is not the only time a simple idea doesn’t really bear the weight of the routine Brown puts on it, such as talking about the nudity in Schindler’s List or the niche reference of the Schooner Scorer influencer.

But when he’s confronting the relationship between performer and audience, especially in the internet age, he’s fascinating. And his audacious ending, engineering a disconcerting lack of closure, is a splendid coup de stand-up.

Review date: 31 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate