REVIEW: Molly McGuinness: Slob, EdFringe 2025 ★★★

As you enter Slob, Molly has laid out a buffet on the stage for you to help yourself to. It’s reminiscent of the buffets you would see in pubs and a working men’s clubs growing up.

As she appears, she addresses the buffet straight away asking the crowd who had what and if it was any good. It’s an imaginative why to start your set and get into the material without using more traditional crowd work methods. It works well as she then jumps straight into chatting about the buffets she used to see when she was younger often at wakes.

Molly then takes you through a series of stories about the regulars at her pubs, starting a relationship with a younger person for the first time and then into the health scare that she had. All of these stories link into the fact that she often isn’t doing too much and how she finds herself lying around to often.

Molly is an excellent story teller as she goes through each story you find yourself being drawn in by her mannerisms and charming northern accent, as she guides you through her thoughts and recent events in her life. Added in amongst the stories are some great one-line gags, a personal favourite was ‘I like to take a jab an anti-vaxxers… because they don’t like it’.

Although all of the stories are interesting and told well it felt as though further jokes could have been added into them, there points where you did feel as though it was a friend telling you a story. The show was entertaining but the structure of the storytelling did allow more humour to be inserted than there was in practice.

The show had a loose theme of struggling to do things and find your place in the world but this felt a little forced at the end. The show was more a series of tales than carrying a proper running theme, I felt it lacked a bit of structure. Moving on from one story to the next almost like she had a number of good ideas but couldn’t quite find a way to link them all together and the health scare was a way to tie it all down even though it was a bit tenuous.

Funny, charming and a great storyteller, Molly will guide you through a lovely hour full of Northern charm.

Recommend Drink: A nice ale to accompany the buffet.

You can catch Slob at CabVol 2 at Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cabaret Voltaire) until the 24th August, every day at 14:55. Slob is also on at 22:40 on the 18th August at Monkey Barrel 4 at Monkey Barrel Comedy . Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.