Once again, the Edinburgh Fringe bears down upon us with crushing inevitability. Frantically, comedians order badges in bulk with things like “Funny Joke” or “Relatable Branding” printed on them. Websites with names like Bloomin’ ‘Eck Daily Digest or Fringewhistle publish a new comedian Q&A every five minutes, their writers and editors shackled to an infernal machine that keeps them churning out this stuff and grants them no rest. “Please, give us pause,” they beg, tears streaming down their soot-stained faces. “Surely nobody is even reading these.” But the machine is deaf to their pleas.

“ASK THE COMEDIANS IF THEY HAVE ANY GOOD TIPS FOR DOING THE FRINGE,” the machine intones, its voice like the grinding of vast metal gears. “ASK THEM IF THEY HAVE ANY FUNNY STORIES ABOUT HECKLES, OR IF THEY HAVE A FAVOURITE PLACE TO EAT.”

Amidst such a joyous outpouring in anticipation of the Fringe, it’s easy for the average to punter to feel completely at sea. “If only comedians themselves would put together their own lists of recommendations!”, this average punter thinks to themselves, scratching ineffectually at their tummy like a cat (do cats do this? I can picture it, so they must). Thank goodness, then, that I am here to be your light in the darkness. Never mind that pretty much every comedian has a list of their own and this is no doubt the seventeenth such email you have received, THIS one is one that you can really rely on, for I am surely the only comedian on Planet Earth with such impeccable taste.

By the by, in case you’re thinking of glossing over this week’s newsletter because you have no plans to go to the Fringe this year, may I briefly step in to draw your attention to this week’s one non-Fringe-related plug, which is for the FINAL London preview of my new show You Wait. Time Passes. on Wednesday. It’s pretty busy but there are tickets still available, and I’d love to send it on its way with a nice full one. If you’re not going to be able to see the show in Edinburgh, I’d love you to come and see this one, or perhaps you might have friends in London who you could send my way? Let’s make it a fun one! The last few at Berlin, Sheffield and Buxton this month have been LOVELY – thanks so much to everyone who’s made them so special.

Anyway, moving onto Fringe recommendations – this is my first full run at the Fringe in 3 years and will be the NINTH full Fringe I have been involved with in some way as a writer or performer or, indeed, writer-performer (eleventh if you include half-runs or short WIP runs, eighth full new show, for those keeping score). As ever, there are way too many shows I could recommend that I think/expect/imagine/hear will be brilliant, and if I were to include all such shows this list would be over two hundred shows long (and I did used to publish lists of recommendations that ran to that length which were useful to precisely nobody).

So for this one I’m limiting myself only to shows I’ve seen in full and therefore KNOW are brilliant (I’m also limiting this only to shows which are either launching fully this Fringe or doing WIP runs, not returning runs of previous shows, because again, I want to make this list useful by imposing rules that keep it concise). Next week I’ll follow this up with a rundown of everything I’m currently involved with at this year’s Fringe, from shows of my own to shows I’ve directed.

Don’t forget that this is just a tiny fraction of the brilliance you can see at the Fringe, and part of the joy of the festival involves taking a chance on something you know almost nothing about, and that maybe sits outside your comfort zones – whether that’s one of the shows below or something else, do leave space for the unexpected! But here’s a good primer list to get you started:

SHOWS I’VE SEEN:

Ada And Bron: The Origin Of Love – Two of the comedy scene’s most naturally funny and adorable new oddballs explore the history of love through a kaleidoscope of bizarre couples. The way their sketches interact with Ed Lyness’s beautiful live music make it feel really quite unlike anything else in sketch. It lives in its own strange, beautiful world.

Adam Riches And John Kearns ARE Ball & Boe – It’s only on for three nights, but they’re gonna be three of the best nights of the Fringe. This idea should really have just been a chaotic, daft one-off, but somehow Adam and John turned this ridiculous idea into a genuinely satisfying, well-structured show with a proper story and everything. It’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in the last year, I think.

Ali Brice Presents Eric Meat Gets The Chop – Eric Meat goes way back to Ali’s debut show back in the day, and is one of the most delightful characters ever created. Ali’s brought him back to explore his views on office culture and redundancy. He’s a master of ridiculously silly crowdwork, and you’re gonna want to go purely just to hear the Honkers theme tune.

Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings And Roundabouts – I had the pleasure of helping Ayoade work on some early ideas for this show as she worked out what she wanted it to be and, while I haven’t seen the final version, what she does in front of an audience is magical to watch. She weaves audiences together so masterfully, and I think this show is going to be incredible.

Eryn Tett Is Sponsored By The Global Megacorp Institute Of Manchester – Nothing suspicious about this one. GMIM is not a cult, GMIM is a brand new cryptocurrency that’s going to the moon, diamond hands emoji diamond hands emoji. This is just up for a WIP this year, but recently won an award at the Reykjavik Fringe, so get on the hype train early!

Janine Harouni: This Is What You Waited For – Janine is a peerlessly brilliant stand-up, and there are routines from this show which keep popping into my head and really making me laugh since I saw it – the one about her dad’s gloves in particular. It’s a really brilliant exploration of parenthood and family, and I’m very honoured to be sharing a director in Jon Brittain with such a masterful show.

Johnny White Really-Really: am/pm – I could listen to Johnny talk about literally anything forever. His shows are like dreams. You step into them and everything feels different inside them and when you leave you wonder where you’ve been, and everything feels like it’s shifted somehow in the time you were dreaming. You could leave a Johnny White Really-Really show and realise that years passed while you were in there, and you are now old and civilisations have come and gone, and it wouldn’t even feel surprising.

Kathy Maniura: The Cycling Man – Probably one of my favourite recent character creations, the Cycling Man is so fully-formed and brilliant. I have met this man so many times (not just because I have spent time with Kathy in character, I mean outside of her shows). She’s done such a great job of capturing this universal bellend archetype, and the show is a riot.

Lachlan Werner: WonderTwunk – I hear it’s Twunk Summer this summer. Have you heard this? It must surely be something to do with Lachlan’s latest outing, which combines puppetry, ventriloquism and virtuoso character comedy to tell the story of the world’s strongest boy, his horrible father and his journey of self-discovery after being told he can never touch another human without killing them.

Sean Morley: Backchannel – Just a short WIP run for this, but Sean’s shows are always a highlight of every festival they’re a part of. This one follows on from some of the experimental comedy streams he’s been pioneering and incorporates live audience chat into the show itself to see if a comedy audience can ever be truly benign. It also opens with one of the funniest audience experiments I’ve ever seen.

Siblings: Dreamweavers – Siblings just crack me up so hard. In this latest show they play scientists who have invented a machine that shows audience members their dreams. I’ve been watching this show develop for a while and have loved it ever since I saw early versions of it at gigs, it’s infectiously silly and dumb. I last saw it at Mach, where a song from the show managed to worm its way permanently into my brain.

Sooz Kempner Is Ugly – And Sooz’s latest is a brilliant, incisive but very very silly takedown of beauty standards and online trolls that also manages to kick Elon Musk a few times for what he’s done to Twitter. Sooz merges really likeable, warm, funny stand-up with incredibly silly characters so naturally and I just really love her shows.

Next week I’m going to complete the second half of this Fringe ‘25 primer by focusing specifically on shows I’ll be involved with in some way – shows of my own, shows I’m performing in as a guest in some capacity, shows I’ve directed and so on. But I don’t want to get too stuck into that this week, as for the time being I’d like to limit myself to only one self-involved plug, and that’s for the preview on Wednesday (did I mention it? I think I did). Next week I will correct the balance by plugging up to a dozen self-involved things, as any good newsletter should.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – The chances that anyone reading this is near enough to Berlin to go to the Berlin Fringe but hasn’t already made plans to and has little enough to do tonight or tomorrow for this plug to be useful are admittedly slim, but I’ve been having such a lovely time this week at the festival that it feels rude not to give it a shout-out. There are two more nights tonight and tomorrow, so get on down to a show or two if for some reason you can!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – The audience member who Frankie Thompson picked out for her Shelley Duvall routine at her Berlin show on Thursday, who brought such a perfect energy to the whole thing, and who she played with so delightfully. Just sublime.

Book Of The Week – Babel by R.F. Kuang, which is 65% a sort of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell-esque magical fantasy retelling of an alternative history of early 19th century Oxford, and 35% a non-fiction exploration of the ethics and philosophy of the art of translation. I’m loving it – thanks to Emily for making it my birthday book!

Album Of The Week – moisturizer by Wet Leg. I have become a full convert to Wet Leg. I went from “Ok, I guess I quite like this novelty band” about two weeks ago to “These guys absolutely rock” in the time it took to watch two songs from their Glastonbury set on iPlayer. This new album is awesome.

Film Of The Week – Elio. This is ok. It might be my favourite Pixar original since Soul, but that’s not saying much (not because Soul was bad, Soul is a masterpiece, but the drop-off in quality post-Soul has been alarmingly steep). At some point I might try writing a newsletter about what’s shifted in Pixar’s storytelling and why their films feel less inherently exciting to me these days (maybe I’m just getting too old for what are ultimately films for children, but I think there’s more to it than that). But in the meantime, this is fine. It was nice to hear Carl Sagan.

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading and, as ever, if you’d like to send this email to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d really appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS Hansa pilgrimage 2025:

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