Making one small step towards levelling comedy’s male-dominated playing field, London’s 99 Club has been awarding £500 to two female or non-binary comics presenting their first Edinburgh Fringe show since 2017.

Picking two recipients from a field of five who took part in a showcase last night was a tougher job than it sounds – the judges’ room was definitely fraught – but at least those not selected got £100 towards the festival’s dizzying costs.

Going on first, Amy Mason broke the ice with a game of charades – with a mischievous payoff wrong-footing us all. And if that makes her sound like something of a game show hostess, think again, as her style is dry and deadpan. Imagine Joe Brand at a sex party, a sarcastic middle-aged woman reacting to other people’s fun with unimpressed scorn.

Indeed, she grumbles about all the myriad sexualities nowadays, but the effect is more self-effacing about her own lack of ambition than reactionary.  Though even on that front, she does herself a disservice, given she gave up on a long marriage when she realised she was gay.

The grumpy cynicism doesn’t provide much energy to enthuse the audience, but gradually, her droll material wins out, culminating in a glorious callback that shows a flair to her writing. 

In contrast, young millennial Sarah Roberts took to the stage in a blaze of ego, enjoyably parodying the stereotypes of a lazy, entitled generation by enthusiastically adopting them.
Equally zeitgeisty is that behind that self-belief is a festering nest of anxieties, and she well-balanced the swagger and the vulnerability.  She claimed to have had a nervous disorder long before it was fashionable - exacerbated, perhaps, by her all-girls education that left her ill-prepared for the world and prone to choosing some awful boyfriends. 

Bad relationships and social paralysis are relatively mainstream stuff, especially given how much mental health talk is in the ether, but Roberts approaches the topics with a zest and a fully-formed persona that makes her very watchable. The first of the night’s £500 bursaries went her way.

Katie Green is a slick, confident stand-up whose punchy material is a testament to the gag-forward US circuit where she started. Her set is tight on punchlines about her being in her ‘broke era’, the difference between sassy Americans and non-confrontational Brits and more tales of bad boyfriends. Her impression of the wannabe rapper she dated is a stand-out, hilariously on the nose.

Topic-wise, she’s not pushing the envelope, but there’s more than enough confessional content to keep things interesting and plenty of solid gags. Above all, it’s immediately apparent this dynamic San Francisco-raised Latina has star quality, funny bones and an easy command of the room. She might have missed out on one of the prizes, but her career is on a fast-rising trajectory. Her broke era surely won’t last long.

It’s hard to believe it’s fellow American Kemah Bob’s debut Fringe, as she seems to have been part of the comedy furniture for a while, with her successful FOC It Up stand-up nights and plenty of TV appearances from Richard Osman’s House Of Games to the best-forgotten Dave gameshow The Island. All that experience gave her the confidence - nay, audacity – to dedicate her entire ten-minute set to one topic: salt. 

Yes really. And it shows her skills that she kept the audience rapt on such a niche topic, spinning what could be straightforward observational comedy into a compelling yarn, advancing conspiracy-adjacent theories about Big Sodium and frequently remarking on how the common condiment got so ‘bougie’. 

She’s playful with it – a fair few asides commenting that, yes, she really is sticking with this idea – and  quietly political, too. The whole whimsy is a thinly-disguised commentary on commercialism and sealed with a nifty one-liner on another social point. Bob’s definitely worth her salt (sorry) and took home the other £500.

Caitriona Dowden, winner of the 2022 Chortle Student Comedy Award, is at the other end of the confidence scale with a rabbit-in-the-headlights performance style and an offputting, nervous habit of looking at her watch every couple of minutes.

Her introversion makes the audience lean in, though, and the quiet monotone suits her quirky set, which starts with a couple of graphs and only gets more arcane and geeky from there. Her material often draws on her degree in religious studies, which means medieval nuns get more mentions than you’ll find on the average episode of Live At The Apollo. Smart and self-effacing about what a social outsider that makes her, Dowden’s modest demeanour well serves the gentle, intelligent, alternative comedy.