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The Guardian

Edinburgh festival 2025: 20 golden comedy shows to see this summer

It's six years since Desiree Burch's last standup show, in which time she's become a fixture of small-screen comedy. Always compelling and thoughtful onstage, the theatre-maker turned standup now returns with a set described as 'a madcap voyage' through midlife crisis and Barrel, 28 July to 10 August Shah's last show, Ends, conquered all before it: a moving, funny and characteristically erudite set about his family's 'generational sacrifice' and the state of multicultural Britain, it graduated from Edinburgh comedy award glory to Netflix special and beyond. After a two-year wait, the follow-up – albeit in work-in-progress form – is upon Barrel, 14-24 August If you saw Doherty's Gay Witch Sex Cult on last year's fringe – a delicious solo Wicker Man knock-off starring a smug and ditzy estate agent – good luck resisting its follow-up. Sad Gay Aids Play turns its spoofing gaze on worthy queer drama in a bid to win its creator a coveted Dome, 30 July to 24 August For a few years from 2013, when she won the Edinburgh comedy award, Bridget Christie bestrode the fringe, delivering show after must-see (clownish, political, unique) show. Now she's a TV star too, and a rarer visitor – making this week-long new material try-out an even hotter Barrel, 2-9 August An out-of-nowhere contender for the festival's top prizes in 2023 with Crushing, standup Smith established himself as heir to Rhod Gilbert's crown as the highly stressed everyman overwhelmed by everyday life. His unlikely-to-be-calm first show since addresses jigsaws, fertility and trying to stay Barrel, 29 July to 24 August In 2023, a 'health scare' poleaxed Cohen's fringe run. Two years on, the New York cabaret diva now tells the story behind that cancellation. Judging by her previous scintillating shows (including 2019's award-winning The Twist? She's Gorgeous …), it will be goofy, tack-sharp, fabulous – and breathtakingly Courtyard, 31 July to 24 August A breakthrough Best Newcomer at last year's festival, Kent-Walters revived the corpse of old-school entertainment in character as Frankie Monroe, MC of a Yorkshire working men's club that was also a portal to hell. The flipside of that show, LIVE!!!, is this year's, DEAD!!!, which finds Frankie communicating from beyond the Barrel, 28 July to 24 August It's hard to think of a standup so indelibly associated with one hit show as Novak. But what a show! A 90-minute philosophical treatise on fellatio, Get on Your Knees (previewed in Edinburgh back in 2018) blew global and then Netflix audiences away. Now we discover: what else has the New Yorker got in her locker?Monkey Barrel, 30 July 30 to 23 August Her dotty character-comedy anthology Skin Pigeon signalled an eccentric new voice. Now Treen returns with another crowded cast of 'weird women' all visiting a suspended-in-time diner. Expect silly. Expect very specific. Expect (for example) a trucker with unusually long arms and a woman who's kept her umbilical Courtyard, 30 July to 24 August Not many people have landed a glove on Trump and his coterie since the Donald became president. Wolf did, with her notorious/celebrated set at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2018. Whether this week-long fringe run delivers scabrous political comedy, or something homelier about new parenthood, remains to be Courtyard, 11-17 August A striking new arrival in recent years to both character and musical comedy, Archie Henderson's louche alter ego has delivered – online and onstage – a succession of pitch-perfect, preening pop-funk parodies. But at what cost? His latest addresses itself – semi-seriously at best – to brittle male Dome, 30 July 30 to 24 August Not a newcomer to the comedy scene, on which he's been making waves since lockdown, but a newbie on the fringe: Toussaint Douglass's festival debut, part of Soho theatre's Edinburgh slate, will be one of the hot tickets this summer, a 'joyfully absurd, charmingly awkward' set, largely about, er, Courtyard, 30 July 30 to 24 August Before he was a star of Flight of the Conchords' sitcom and pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death, New Zealander Darby was a human cartoon, his stage performances silly symphonies of antic mime and sound. His new show revives that shtick after a 13-year hiatus to address the spectre of AI …Pleasance Courtyard, 1-10 August Hollywood royalty comes to Edinburgh in the form of the talk-show host and movie star O'Donnell. Having fled the US at the start of Trump 2.0 – she is 20 years into a public slanging match with the former Apprentice host – O'Donnell's fringe debut addresses her recent relocation to Balloon, 1-10 August On Channel 4's opening night in 1982, the anthology series that thrust alternative comedy's soon-to-be megastars into the nation's living rooms was launched. Now a handful of its funniest films are re-screened by comic Robin Ince, series creator Peter Richardson, and special guests including Alexei Sayle and Keith the Tonic Nucleus, 2-3 and 8-10 August When Ashfaq won the fringe's Best Newcomer award two years ago, she had arrived for the first time from her native Mumbai. The standup now promises (tongue slightly in cheek, perhaps?) a sophomore set displaying her 'bona fide bad girl and edgelord' Barrel, 30 July to 24 August To a CV that already included 'sidekick to Alan Partridge' and 'Edinburgh comedy award-winner', Key can now add screenwriter and star of the much-loved movie The Ballad of Wallis Island. Fresh from its success, he brings another slim volume of offbeat standup and oddball poetry to the fringe Courtyard, 30 July to 17 August The words 'affordable' and 'Edinburgh festival' are rarely connected. But each year, the Free Fringe keeps the spirit of ye olde fringe alive, with comics including Richard Gadd, Liam Williams and Ellie Taylor performing on it. This year, droll musical comic Huge Davies straps in to his wearable keyboard with a work-in-progress for the Lounge at PBH's Free Fringe @ Whistlebinkies, 2-24 August To any fan of the sketch group Sheeps – and why on earth wouldn't you be? – no more intriguing note is struck in this year's fringe programme than the one announcing a standup debut by Daran 'Jonno' Johnson. Long the goofball of that fantastic trio, for three nights only in Edinburgh he dips his toe into solo Voltaire @ Monkey Barrel, 11-13 August Billed as clown? Check. Studied under Philippe Gaulier? Check. Eye-catching source material? Check. The zeitgeisty ingredients are in place for Jessica Barton's show to hit fringe paydirt, and reviews from its Melbourne premiere bode well for a show that mixes song and silliness, a bit of heartbreak, and the perfect nannying of, ahem, Mary Cowgate, 31 July to 24 August