Rich Hall

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Unlike many other comedians at the Fringe, Rich Hall hasn't in the title of his show appended his name with a witty or cryptic phrase – he doesn't need to. The famously grumpy Hall comes to the packed Pleasance Grand with no gimmick or overarching theme, but a seemingly never-ending stream of hilarious barbs aimed at the excesses of both his home and adopted countries.

Hall knows exactly how to pull a crowd's strings: he starts off with a panegyric to the ingenuity of the Scottish nation and makes brilliant observations about our money ("Your banknotes are like snowflakes – no two are the same"), our eating habits and our politics. He brings, however, the rare perspective of someone who has come from elsewhere and now knows and loves our country even more than we do, rather than falling back—as many others do—on trite national stereotypes. In short, Hall finds humour in the fact that we are unique, and not just different. 

Hall is an extremely nimble, versatile performer, jumping back and forth between Britain and America, standup and music, his routine and improvisation. He deftly manipulates the audience to put down some particularly persistant hecklers and you get the feeling that Hall could have not prepared at all and would still have had the audience in the palm of his hand. 

Comics that are so used to the refined world of stadium tours and TV panel shows sometimes struggle in the more rough-and-ready world of the Fringe. Not so with Hall. He is a true Fringe legend. And you have to admire a man who can find a rhyme for "Penicuik" and knows perhaps the world's only joke about quantitative easing.