Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Matthew Gallagher rails against his venue’s description of him as a ‘joyous buffoon’, though it’s a persona he might do well to lean into.

At the moment, it’s quite hard to define who he is, with a fragmented Fringe debut that never quite settles. The Last Minute title suggests he’s a man who’s perpetually ill-prepared and – although he never addresses it directly – that impression certainly comes across, even on the penultimate performance of the festival.

His hour starts with a pointless video skit showing him sleeping on the couch as the minutes to showtime tick away, before he bursts onto a stage with an awkward rendition of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and an aggressive air that makes the audience retreat. 

It eventually becomes clear that the Glaswegian comic is not so intense and antagonistic, but it takes him a while to gain the room’s trust – especially after another video of him trying to order components for an Edinburgh show from a drive-thru spreads only bafflement.

But when he relaxes into being himself with a story about his religious schooling, his natural humour comes through. He’s good at act-outs – drama school, you see – with an especially good recreation of a Glaswegian nutter. And the idea of a musical based on his hometown’s sectarian tensions is amusing.

The stand-up is punctuated at random points with silly sketches which play up to the aforementioned buffoonery, such as a silly Donald Trump impersonation or miming ‘a seagull being framed for a bank job’ – short, daft sections that land well.

Speaking about his unfulfilled ambitions to follow in the thespian footsteps of his actor dad Frank – who plays gangster Lenny Murdoch in the BBC Scotland soap River City – is engaging, if not laugh-out-loud funny, as he pines to return to the slender, good-looking youth of his first publicity headshot. Breaking off for an oddly sincere section crediting The Stand comedy club for its initiative that helped him and four other debutants make it to the Fringe strikes rather an odd tone, however.

His inexperience pokes through several times. Even the joke that was named best of the Fringe at the ISH awards – ‘Here’s a fact about the Anne Frank diary - they brought out an audiobook version of it - here’s my review - it was shit - she was whispering, I couldn’t hear anything that was going on’ contains far too many words, even though the gag at its core is a strong one.

Last Minute is, then, something of a curate’s egg, but if Gallagher trusted himself more and polished up the writing, it’s likely he’d have something decent to offer.

Review date: 31 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Stand 2