The Edinburgh Fringe is over but not the reviews. Beyond The Joke was seeing shows until the very last day so here is another round-up of the best and the rest.

 

Freddie Meredith (Pleasance, four stars) picked up an Edinburgh Comedy Award Best Newcomer nomination for his full length debut. In Need A Light? Meredith created a character that was part Will from Inbetweeners, part Mr Bean and full cringe. He was that awkward shy adolescent who is desperate to fit in with the cool kids, but not really getting it right, hanging out in da club and shopping online for the tightest of tight jeans.

 

And it's so well done that although it's initially full cringe – there's a splash of David Brent in his knock-off designer jacket aspirations too – you feel an awful lot of sympathy for this outsider. If you wanted to go with modern parlance you'd probably say he was heavily masking, doing his best to fit in. And the joy of the show is that despite his awkward dancing and his inappropriate conversations with audience members it works. By the end he's formed his own gang and it's gone from watch-behind-your-fingers to weirdly touching.

 

There seemed to be a trend at the Fringe this year for nice middle class* white men doing extreme characters. Tom Towelling also received a Best Newcomer nomination for his show Tom Towelling Teaches You to Knit (Pleasance Courtyard, three stars). When I walked in he was serenading the audience with a terrible karaoke version of Elton John's Tiny Dancer and everyone was loving it so much I felt like I'd arrived late at a party and missed a gag. I also began to wonder if this was going to be the whole show. 

 

In fact when Towelling got stuck into his material there was plenty of fun to be had here. But despite the title elements didn't really seem to knit together. There were anecdotes from his teaching day job and motorways, gags about tying wool from the mic stand to audience members which, presumably, was a way of saying that we are all connected. Knitwit if you like. At it's best there were some upending moments that made you wonder what the heck was going on, but it seemed to end with a dance routine that was more about Towelling living out his extrovert fantasies than entertaining the audience. 

 

Jonathan Oldfield (Pleasance Courtyard, three stars) also ticked the white, middle class*, male boxes with his show Exquisite Corpse, in which he gets his audience onside immediately by inviting them to draw body parts which he then links together on a rotating stand so that he can create characters out of the cartoonish mash-ups. It's a strong start before things move on to more of a mish-mash of sketches and routines.

 

As with Towelling above, this is a show that shifts around in both good and bad ways. It keeps you interested and keeps you on your toes because you never know what's coming next - a true story about his childhood or a flight of fancy? The one thing that is consistent is that the energy never lets up and there is never a dull moment. Yet somehow a show which is partly about connection – Oldfield says he travelled a lot as a child (I'm guessing this is true) so presumably had to learn to make friends quickly – didn't quite connect with me. Though what Oldfield lacks in funny bones he more than makes up for in sweaty commitment.

 

One act that I felt missed out on more attention was Australia's Casey Filips (Assembly, four stars). I'd like to go into detail about his show What A Character, but the trouble is that within a minute of sitting down in the second row (there were only three rows in the small tin hut venue) I thought it best to put my notebook away. Filips was playing a bouncer complete with bodycam, interrogating audience members and throwing them out of the gig for the most minor infringements of his own arbitrary house rules. Some were invited backstage to down shots, which was a shame for them, because they missed chunks of a superb show.

 

Filips is a pretty fearless performer, doing the sort of thing in a live setting that Sacha Baron Cohen does on film. His other characters were maybe not quite as strong as this opener but they clearly showed that Filips had plenty of strings to his bow. There'a Bond-style audition and an original take on Jesus, but I particular liked his sound operator who went to ridiculous lengths to get the right recordings out of his audience. I'm not sure how he was overlooked by umpteen awards committees. This is someone who has funny bones to spare. 

 

Talking of Award winners, Sam Eley walked away with the biggest award in Edinburgh for ‘Sam Eley is Basil Crumbwick’ (Monkey Barrel, four stars). An award which is the biggest in terms of size (see picture) but not the most prestigious, more a canny promo gimmick created by comedy streaming service NextUp, who did sterling work with nightly live streams which were great for fans unable to get to the Fringe for various reasons (I even watched a few late night ones myself when I got in – as if i hadn't had enough comedy already)

 

Eley's creation is an absurd-looking creature who spends most of the show bemoaning his sad, bleak life, but in a hilarious self-deprecating way. Inevitably the mask – and northern accent – evokes thoughts of Frank Sidebottom, but the character is very different, a miserable git who has been banned from every pub in his hometown of Peterborough. Just one of many grievances he airs during this laugh-packed hour (extra laughs came from him banging his oversized head on the low ceiling or attempting to drink from a plastic water bottle).

 

Maybe, if you want to be pretentious, masks, as in 'masking' was something of a theme at this mental health-fixated Fringe this year. Stephen Catling wore a fish mask, Spencer Jones put on various different homemadeheads. If you don't want to be pretentious you could say that character comedy returned to the Fringe this year with a vengeance. And a twist.