Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Irish comedian Roger O’Sullivan talks of having a peasant mindset: the feeling that nothing good will ever happen to him, and if it does, it will eventually turn sour. Is this born of Catholic guilt or from centuries of English colonial repression? Who knows?

Irishness is the alpha and the omega of this set: from his own upbringing in a hard-up rural family with a poverty of ambition as well as money, to the national love of misery in a country where RIP.ie is one of the top websites, to his first brush with showbusiness (being an altar boy at Mass, but proving an embarrassment to himself when he rang the bell at the wrong time), to an instinctual hatred of Bono.

It’s intelligent observational comedy, setting everything in a context broader than the anecdotes themselves, which come with a winning eccentricity. He offers the occasional edgy quip, speaking to Irish nationalism or even Isis bride Lisa Smith – which are surprising turns given his gentle, low-key delivery, but adding a little grit to the charm.

He’s no firebrand, but has a gently rhythmic cadence, affectionately calling the audience ‘lads’, to bind us together. His delivery can, unfortunately, be slightly soporific, but he partially negates this with a few graphical inserts on screen, deploying very primitive computer graphics and a hilarious take on the Guitar Hero game. 

He is never far from imposter syndrome, primarily as an Irishman trying to make his way on the English comedy circuit, something his upbringing could never have prepared him for. But even when he returned to Dublin for some gigs, he feared the version of his homeland he had cultivated on stage wouldn’t actually resonate with reality. Luckily, he reports, it did.

O’Sullivan is strong at building a world based on his family background, peppered with literate jokes, even if undersold by his restrained delivery that denies the show a little sparkle.

Review date: 31 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett