Jordan Brookes' new Edinburgh show: sharp, less ambitious
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- Jordan Brookes, the 2019 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, returns to the Fringe with a new hour titled The Part of You That's Always Screaming
- The show is structured around Brookes eating a croissant on a train, seated between a window and a window-gazing fellow passenger, with the snack becoming a 'performative act'
- The material spirals outward into riffing on pickup artistry, webcam-hacker anxieties, and the 'super-strong mother' trope, all orbiting the question of how being seen changes behavior
- At one mid-show moment, the lights drop, a 'disturbing industrial soundscape' swells, and Brookes 'jerks threateningly across the stage' in the set's most transgressive sequence
- The reviewer judges the hour 'spiky and interrogative comedy' but notes Brookes' usual ambition is muted — dramatic payoffs teased by the opening and the croissant framing never land
- The Part of You That's Always Screaming runs at Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 30 August
Why it matters: For a 2019 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner whose brand is built on reshaping the form, a deliver-the-philosophy-rather-than-the-stunts turn marks a deliberate tonal shift — trading spectacle for sustained inquiry into how observation shapes identity. Audiences accustomed to Brookes' boundary-breaking pyrotechnics will need to recalibrate toward sharper-but-slower comic thinking, while first-time viewers are likely getting one of the 'twistiest and deepest-thinking' hours on this year's fringe.
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