one4review | On 10, Aug 2026

Frankie McNair is clearly too much for this audience — far too funny, far too fast. She has us cackling at things we’d really really rather not be seen laughing at, it seems impossible not to though.

She careens onto the stage like some kind of goblin Pied Piper, dragging a timid fringe audience 100 miles an hour towards a “huge ass mindset”.

The show is a battering ram of incessant one-liners, threaded through hilarious character vignettes. Punctuated with first class storytelling, her bespoke mental framework and something that went deeply, deeply wrong in her childhood.

A comedy show with a central theme around incestuous abuse during childhood would seem to any sane person- ill advised. In her hands it is funny without feeling awkward and sad and somehow it works.

This is a show that genuinely requires a content warning. Credit to McNair as she stops making us laugh for a moment to make clear we are free to leave at any moment without judgement.

Our verbal consent is needed and then held with care and authority.

Once that’s been explained there’s a genuine adrenaline spike in my veins. McNair back on track is genuinely, dangerously funny.

This stuff isn’t what nice people came to laugh at! Maybe Frankie McNair is one of those people that can make anyone laugh at anything?

Yet somehow she got us to verbally consent to all of it.

There is nothing too dark for her to lampoon (if it’s within her own experience.)and she’s not set on her tracks either.

At one point she stops mid-show to out-sing someone singing in another room, a battle that concludes with her declaring herself victorious to our delight.

Her google-eyed faux-noir femme fatale, she literally needs to stop and give the room a minute to recover.

That said, the lady gremlin holding court is slowly unveiled to reveal a real genuine community minded salt of the earth human, truly vulnerable and unless you’re made of brick- inspiring.

Frankie McNair takes an audience somewhere they probably wouldn’t willingly go — then makes them crack up once they get there.

If making people laugh is a contact sport, she’s Mike Tyson as opposed to Muhammad Ali.

But hey my ass genuinely felt a little bigger as I walked out.

****1/2
Reviewed by Sharpie
Gilded Balloon Teviot
Until 30th August (not 17th)
19.00 (1 hour)