Fringe Comedy reviews: Emma Holland | Aalex Mandel-Dallal | Tom Neenan | Alan Jay | Lizzy Hoo

Fringe Comedy reviews: Emma Holland Aalex Mandel-Dallal Tom Neenan Alan Jay Lizzy Hoo In his latest dispatch from the Fringe, Jay Richardson finds a show regarding a dead dog is far from a sad hour and admires the occasionally patchy efforts of.

Key points

• An understatedly charming story this from former head scribe for The Mash Report and artist Tom Neenan.
• For just £2 a month you can obtain unlimited access to scotsman.com plus 2-for-1 Fringe tickets.
• Still, Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan ties together neatly and arrives at a tender resolution.
• Tom Neenan: Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan.
• Aalex Mandel-Dallal's a real kook, driven to perform but rattling with anxieties and insecurities.

As the Australian recalls how her beloved greyhound passed away unexpectedly just before Christmas 2024, pretty much all of the drama in Emma Holland's latest superb show is relayed in the opening minute. Overwhelmed with grief in her Brisbane apartment. It immediately felt bigger and emptier, she and her husband decamped to her parents' place nearby. And gradually, she set concerning trying to piece herself back together through unremarkable daily rituals, initially with her loved ones, then on her own.

Although Holland speaks touchingly of her dog and conveys the debilitating stress his loss provoked in her, this is a far-from-sad hour, with the comic having accepted the challenge of proving her resilience with alacrity.

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It helps that she's a high-achieving daftie, vaingloriously sharing her excellent school results with protestations that it was a mistake. But she additionally delights in her mother's instinctive parochialism. It could be interpreted as civic pride but which the snooty comic looks down upon, bolstering her argument with carefully plotted visual evidence.

For context, a mother-daughter shopping excursion failed to rouse her from her funk, with Holland outraged at the cost of a tacky crystal figurine. And her efforts to mute her perturbed brain in a floatation tank is scuppered by an insensitive spa employee. Relaying her stumbling healing journey with a series of unexpected visual gags and surprise set pieces, there's a compelling dual address from the sad, irritable Holland of the past and the more whimsical jester of the present.

And this temporal slippage ensures that the more-or-less chronological narrative never seems predictable, with abundant gags planted for afterwards pay-off. Unlike a certain British political figure that Holland resurrects with waggish impunity, there's no full circle, happy revival in the tale either, simply a reiteration that tragedy requires more than time to equal comedy. Jay Richardson. Aalex Mandel-Dallal: Where Was I? Hoots @ Nicolson Square (Venue 63) until 30 August.

Aalex Mandel-Dallal's a real kook, driven to perform but rattling with anxieties and insecurities. Favouring exposition in song form, the stand-up tunefully adapts garage chart hits to reflect upon her life, rare moments of controlled assurance in an otherwise excitable delivery. She additionally employs an unfolded plastic case full of mementoes and other props, aide mémoires that range from the dehumidifier that produced her flat bearable enough to warrant its own musical number, to photos of her Jewish-German grandmother and Jewish-Iraqi grandmother.

Their example and suffering is something that she carries close to her heart, even if she can't recall which side of her chest it's on. In a loving relationship with her Irish fiancé, despite his stubborn insistence that she watches Lord of the Rings, her initial, wired nerviness is largely attributable to her worries regarding procreation, rooted in the egg freezing procedure that she's lately undergone.

But as she recounts her tough experience of going travelling, it's fully apparent that the neurotic comic has a complex interplay of trauma that requires much more than this patchy but generally appealing debut hour to unpack. Jay Richardson. Tom Neenan: Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan. Underbelly, George Square (Venue 300) until 30 August.

Meanwhile, an understatedly charming story this from former head scribe for The Mash Report and artist Tom Neenan. Hinging on a commission the comic took to paint a rather tough pensioner, it's a tale suffused with warmth and wit concerning how we see ourselves, venturing into some tough territory but unfolding with a high gag count.

Although painting professionally is a relatively recent side hustle for Neenan, he's had artistic pretensions for much longer, evidenced by his outlandish, adolescent reinterpretation of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch and an absurdly high-concept, politically incorrect feature film he created when he was too young to know better. Much more pressing for him in the recent past nevertheless, given his invite to a friend's wedding abroad, is his challenging relationship with food.

When perhaps he could have opened up more vulnerably and let the show off its guardrails, he refrains from sharing too plenty of details, much more comfortable cracking lines with writerly panache and a pleasing, accessible breadth of culture. Still, Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan ties together neatly and arrives at a tender resolution. Jay Richardson. Alan Jay: Hell Hath No Humour Like a Gayboy Scorned. Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 30 August.

Even by the general standards of stand-up, Alan Jay is playing with a full deck of childhood trauma and mental and physical problems, so he can be forgiven for his brutally dark sense of humour, presented completely in the wrong time slot of early evening. As a gay man from Castlemilk, he's transgressing boundaries just for being, and getting, out, whilst offering a few postcards from the underclass to any middle-class poverty tourists at the Edinburgh Fringe.

As the son of hard drug addicts raised chaotically he's done incredibly well to outwardly reject bitterness, the open, enquiring mind he's acquired from the time he spent in Asia and his current status as a 33-year-old mature student a useful step in his efforts to reclaim his narrative.

As he speaks of a toxic, mixed-race relationship, not that there haven't been bumps along the way in recent times either. And while some of his gags are wince-inducingly penetrating, still others are just punishingly crude, the excited overstep of a relatively new performer. Still he's clearly obtained considerable potential, with a mischievous cheek, daring in his writing and that unenviable backstory to further exploit. Jay Richardson.

For now, fringe Comedy reviews: Emma Holland Aalex Mandel-Dallal Tom Neenan remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.