Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

At last, a confident performer delivering an hour jam-packed with laughs and barely a pause to breathe.  Matt Forde is the best possible presenter of this material, putting little of himself on view and instead introduces the politicians by quote and impression and lets them skewer themselves in their own words.

There’s an element of preaching to the choir here. No audience member would come and be outraged that he satirises the party leaders, past and present. We’re here more in the spirit of ‘well, someone’s got to say it’.

Nobody is safe, and some are definitely more mockable than others.  It is joyous to be reminded of Rishi Sunak being left in the dust by schoolchildren asking him the hard questions, his relentless perkiness used as a weapon and then, in the interest of balance, revelling in Keir Starmer’s robotic awkwardness and strangled delivery.

The thing with Forde is that there’s no malice, none of this is an attack. He maintains a genial astonishment at his subjects’ blatant stupidity and arrogance, from the SNP, round and round the Tories, across Labour, even the King gets a serving.

I was surprised by a cheap crack about Nicola Sturgeon, the same one that Simon Evans had in his show, which doesn’t really stack up, and wondered if he’d get stick for repeatedly using ‘this country’ when he clearly meant England. But the audience were less jumpy than me on the subject. However, that is really an insignificant bother in an utterly assured, riotously funny, smooth hour.

Many artists on the Fringe unconsciously tell you by their manner and diffidence that this is their second job, but Forde is professional all day long.  He entertains the audience with politics and ideas rather than airing his own anxieties and insecurities in the hope that the audience will find ego-baring a winning formula.

What’s marvellous is that the way things are, he’ll never be short of material.

Review date: 15 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Julia Chamberlain
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard