The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is always a bit of a lottery. With thousands of shows taking place across the city, choosing what to see can be overwhelming, particularly when you’re trying to squeeze as much as possible into a few days.
This year, I caught three very different comedy shows: Tom Neenan, Dom McGovern and Shane Torres. All three take a personal approach to comedy, all including different areas of trauma and then how it has influenced their life, but each has a very different style and subject matter.
Tom Neenan – Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan
Tom Neenan – Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan
Tom Neenan’s new show, Portrait of a Tom as a Young Neenan, is an hour of storytelling comedy built around an unusual lockdown hobby: painting portraits. The story begins with Neenan taking up portrait painting in 2020 and eventually being commissioned to paint an 86-year-old man. Alongside this comes an invitation to a rather fancy wedding, and the two events send him into a spiral of memories, insecurities and self-reflection.
The show explores themes including body image, anxiety, ageing, self-perception and even AI, while using the idea of a portrait to consider the difference between how we see ourselves and how other people see us. Neenan is perhaps best known for his writing work, including The Mash Report and BBC radio comedy, and his style here is less about a succession of big, traditional stand-up gags and more about carefully constructed stories, observations and absurd situations. There are plenty of laughs along the way, with physical comedy, impressions and some wonderfully awkward moments.
This was one of those shows where I found myself laughing out loud so many times, but also having moments where I stopped and thought, actually, I really relate to that. Tom’s experiences felt very relatable, and I really enjoyed the way he was able to take everyday thoughts, experiences and insecurities and turn them into something genuinely funny.
His style is also very much my cup of tea. It isn’t overly ‘in your face’, and there wasn’t a huge amount of audience participation, which, reader, gets a big tick from me! I much prefer being able to sit back, watch and enjoy a comedian’s stories without worrying that I might suddenly become part of the show!
There were some deeper themes running through the show, but these were explored in a way that felt natural rather than uncomfortable or overly heavy. Tom manages to balance the more thoughtful moments with plenty of laughs, so the show never felt like it was trying too hard to make a serious point.
Overall, I really enjoyed it. It was funny, relatable and just the right amount of thought-provoking, without ever losing sight of the fact that I was there to have a good time.
⭐ 4 out of 5 stars
Dom McGovern – Prize Hog
If you’re looking for something a little more energetic, Dom McGovern’s Prize Hog is his debut hour at the Fringe and it has already attracted plenty of attention.
McGovern, who is a co-writer of Chicken Shop Date and has supported comedians including Sophie Duker, Olga Koch and Aisling Bea, turns his attention to body image, masculinity, Catholic guilt and the messages we absorb about our bodies growing up. The subject matter could easily make for a fairly heavy hour, but McGovern approaches it with a distinctive combination of caustic wit, camp humour and personal storytelling. The show looks at everything from diet culture and Catholicism to the pressures surrounding masculinity and the complicated relationship many of us can have with our own bodies.
What seems to make Prize Hog particularly effective is the contrast between the more serious themes and McGovern’s energetic, mischievous delivery. Reviews have praised his ability to move between genuine vulnerability and big laughs without allowing either side to overwhelm the other. The result is a show that manages to be both very funny and surprisingly candid, while never feeling like a lecture about body image.
This was a show that, despite covering some fairly heavy topics, was laugh-out-loud hilarious from start to finish. I honestly don’t know how Dom manages to take subjects such as Catholic trauma and guilt, body image and mental health and make them so funny, while still treating those subjects with the sensitivity they deserve. He never makes light of the issues themselves, but instead finds the humour in the situations, experiences and absurdities that can come with them.
Dom also has a brilliant stage presence. He moves around the room, engaging the whole audience, and his facial expressions alone somehow manage to make the stories even funnier! There were plenty of moments where I found myself laughing before he’d even finished the sentence simply because of his expression or delivery.
The one-hour show absolutely flew by, and there were a few moments of audience interaction that were clearly ad-libbed but were just as hilarious as the prepared material. Being able to think so quickly on your feet and turn an unexpected audience moment into part of the comedy is such a skill, and Dom did it brilliantly.
There was a great balance between the more personal and thought-provoking parts of the show and the completely ridiculous moments that had the audience in stitches. By the end, the show received a standing ovation, and it was very easy to see why.
I absolutely loved this one and would definitely recommend it if you like comedy that is personal, energetic, a little bit cheeky and isn’t afraid to tackle some deeper subjects.
⭐ 5 out of 5 stars
Shane Torres – Skinned Knees
Shane Torres – Edinburgh Fringe listing
American comedian Shane Torres brings his Edinburgh Fringe debut to the festival with Skinned Knees, a deeply personal show about family, grief, masculinity and love. Torres draws on his experiences of his parents and the circumstances surrounding their deaths, exploring what happens when you’re forced to take on responsibility and “hold everything together” after losing the people who raised you.
It sounds like potentially difficult material for a comedy show, but that’s precisely where Torres finds the humour. His storytelling moves between the painful, the poignant and the downright ridiculous, with stories about his family and his experiences growing up alongside reflections on traditional ideas of masculinity.
The show has been praised for finding the balance between grief and laughter without becoming overly sentimental. One review described it as a lesson in masculinity and motherly love, highlighting Torres’ ability to find comedy in some very difficult experiences while retaining the emotional heart of the stories.
There are some wonderfully dark and unexpected moments, too – the sort of stories that make you wonder whether you’re really supposed to be laughing, before finding yourself doing exactly that.
This was probably the hardest of the three shows for me to review, as I found it a little more difficult going than the others. Shane covers a lot of heavy topics, including grief, family and loss, and while these are undoubtedly important subjects to talk about, I sometimes found it difficult to find the humour in them when some of the situations he was describing were genuinely heartbreaking.
There were still plenty of funny moments, and Shane is clearly a very talented storyteller, but for me, this felt less like a traditional comedy show and more like a very personal story that happened to have a lot of humour woven through it. There wasn’t the same feeling of non-stop laughter that I experienced with the other two shows.
I’m also not particularly familiar with Shane’s work, despite knowing that he is a well-known comedian in the US, so I wasn’t sure whether this is typical of his usual style. His delivery felt quite subdued at times, which perhaps added to the more reflective and emotional feel of the show.
One way I can probably best explain it is that there were quite a few moments when the audience were gasping or collectively going “awww” rather than laughing! There were certainly laughs, but there were also a lot of moments where you could hear how emotionally invested the audience had become in the stories. I think you could describe it as having quite a dark and bittersweet style of humour.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism – comedy can absolutely be about more than just making an audience laugh – but I think it’s worth knowing what you’re going into if you’re considering seeing this show. There are some big and emotional subjects covered, and if you’re looking for a light-hearted hour of comedy, this may not be the show for you.
Having said that, I did still enjoy it. Shane tells his stories honestly and with a lot of heart, and there were some genuinely funny moments alongside the more difficult ones. I think it’s a show that will probably stay with me for longer than some of the more straightforward comedy shows – just perhaps not for quite the reasons I expected when I walked in!
⭐ 3.5 out of 5 stars
Three very different hours of comedy
What I particularly liked about seeing these three shows was how different they were, despite all three comedians drawing heavily on their own experiences.
Tom Neenan takes everyday awkwardness, insecurity and self-doubt and turns them into carefully crafted storytelling. Dom McGovern tackles body image and masculinity with plenty of energy, wit and self-deprecation. And Shane Torres takes some incredibly personal experiences of family and grief and finds a way to make them genuinely funny without losing the emotion behind them.
That’s probably one of the best things about the Fringe: you can walk into three comedy shows expecting three variations on stand-up and come out having experienced three completely different styles of storytelling.
I would love to spend more time there next time and see even more. It would be great to hear what you think!
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe runs from 7–31 August 2026, with more than 3,600 shows across the city this year.
