In recent years comedians have tended to focus inwards and find comedy in their mental health. Edinburgh 2024 was probably peak ADHD. It reached the point where a performer had a unique selling point if they announced that they were not neurodivergent. Judging by the first week of the 2025 Fringe however, stand-ups are now exploring their bodies rather than their brains. A sense of the fragility of life itself hangs over this year’s Fringe.
Sometimes the stories come completely out of the blue. New Yorker Cat Cohen, winner of the 2019 Best Newcomer Award here, had a major tour planned for 2023 which she abruptly cancelled. In her latest show Broad Strokes – don’t call it a comeback – Cohen (Pleasance, five stars) reveals how she had a stroke at the age of 30. It was totally unexpected, though looking back there may have been a link to the migraines that she had suffered from since childhood. She thought she was a hypochondriac but an MRI scan revealed a hole in her heart. Though of course she could still be a hypochondriac.
Cohen, all main character energy and frilly outfit, addresses her health drama in the form of musical comedy, switching seamlessly between narrative and spectacularly catchy show tunes. She has always been known for being simultaneously self-aware and painfully self-obsessed and onstage she tackles both traits, joking about wanting to both normal and exceptional. Thankfully she is “100% fine” now and her tale of defibrillators, paralysed limbs and a cardiologist genuinely called Dr Love is the hit of the Fringe. Some canny producer should arrange a West End or Broadway run immediately.
There is a running gag in comedy that anything can be material. Londoner Emmanuel Sonubi (Pleasance, four stars) plays up to this stereotype in Life After Near Death, announcing that he once booked a colonic just for the subsequent routine. But the bulk of his show, Life After Near Death, is about heart failure that was definitely never planned. Not that he was surprised when he started coughing up blood. He had been a heavy smoker and although he almost died his overriding emotion in intensive care was relief that it wasn’t lung cancer.
Sonubi is a genial, accessible presence and effortlessly finds the funny in a set that ripples along with laughs and never flatlines. Towards the end things take a particularly dark turn when he talks about abuse he suffered as a child and how that defined him for so many years. It’s a – no pun intended – heartstopping moment as he bares his soul to pin-drop silence. His hospital stay saved his life in more than one way. He emerged a changed man who would never live a lie again. The show is touring after the Fringe. Don’t miss it.
Stand-up Susie McCabe (Assembly, four stars) was gearing up for an Edinburgh run in 2024 when she had a heart attack on tour. Glaswegians are not known for their healthy diets and she wryly notes that maybe it was fate that it happened in a place with the word “chip” in it – Chipping Sodbury. She had just met up with her brother and was getting her tyres pumped up in Kwik Fit when she suddenly ran out of air herself.
Having had a year to process the incident McCabe’s Best Behaviour is a way of drawing a line under the cathartic cardiac event. She is naturally full of praise for the NHS – an ambulance arrived within three minutes and when “two lesbian paramedics” emerged she knew she was in safe hands. It’s a cautionary tale though. There were no warning signs and like Sonubi and Cohen she was relatively young, at 44, underlining that the heart has no respect for youth.
After a triptych of shows where comedians talked about dying, and not in the sense of having a bad gig, it was a relief to see a show about someone with a dodgy leg. Until even here it turned into a matter of life or death. Alison Spittle is a well-established Irish comedian who is now making waves elsewhere. Her show Big is a funny and emotional account of close encounters that took her to the brink.
Spittle had been overweight since childhood, but until recently didn’t have a problem with it. “I love being fat. I was sad when Adele lost weight and I’m keeping a close eye on Lizzo,” she quips. But a health scare made her rethink her priorities. What seemed like innocuous leg blisters turned into septicemia, with her organs on the cusp of shutting down. On the plus side, she deadpans, it meant she didn’t have to do an upcoming gig in Guildford. Spittle came through it, lost the “weight of an XL bully” and, maybe more importantly, has delivered a stormer of a Fringe show.
When you go through a dramatic medical experience it is only human to see the funny side. And when that dramatic medical experience involves your genitals what can a comedian do but go public about it. Ben Pope (Assembly, four stars) had been troubled by a pain down under for a decade but, because he was a man, of course he did nothing until a combination of excruciating agony and a compassionate (or perhaps frustrated) girlfriend persuaded him to seek help. Phimosis, the inability to retract the foreskin, was diagnosed. Or as Pope puts it: “too much packaging”.
The Cut is his slickly delivered tale of how adult circumcision cure the problem, but Pope neatly weaves this into reflections about family and how generations pass things on, both material and emotional. An engaging, insightful motif is how nothing is permanent, from clothes that we donate to charity shops to life itself. And of course there are plentiful giggles along the way, such as when he accidentally receives a hospital letter addressed to “Mr Sexual”. Pope is superb company and the result is a tight monologue that might have men in the audience crossing their legs at times but leaves everyone laughing.
Four stars for Mr Sexual, five stars for the medics in all of these stories.
Click here for dates and tickets for all shows at https://www.edfringe.com/
