“Garry Starr: Classic Penguins”, Pleasance Grand, Edinburgh
Mark Brown at the Edinburgh Fringe
★★☆☆☆
26 August 2026
Please note, dear reader, that the following review contains spoilers. You could stop reading here, of course. However, then you would risk falling victim – as I did – to a wildly misjudged recommendation and ending up having the worst night in a theatre of your entire life.
“What could possibly be so awful about Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, one of the hit shows of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, which is packing in full houses of 750 people on a regular basis?”, I hear you ask. Could it be the fact that the big “reveal” of this production – which the ingeniously stage named Mr Starr describes, inaccurately, as “crazy clowning” – is nothing more inventive than the Australian comedian performing the entire piece stark bollock naked?
Or maybe it’s the moments when – presumably assisted by ticket holders’ consumption of overpriced, inhibition-busting Fringe booze – Starr tests the boundaries of numerous willing members of the audience to do gross things? Anyone for four or five people being prepared to transfer chewed up grapes from one mouth to the next?
As you have probably gathered by now, Starr – who is taking his show to New York and London after his stint on the Fringe – may be simultaneously packing out the Pleasance Grand and filling his personal coffers, but he’s not likely to be challenging Billy Connolly, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers or Bill Hicks for a place in the comedy hall of fame any time soon.
None of which is to say that Starr is without talent. The man has an abundant capacity in physical clowning: even if its primary application here is to variations on the show’s main theme, which is, namely, displaying his genitals and anus from a variety of angles, including in an extended act of nude crowd surfing and a naked aerial circus routine.
The Australian has also taken good ethical and legal advice, regularly checking with volunteers from the audience that they both understand what is being asked of them and are sober enough to give meaningful consent.
Never judge a book by its cover, they say. That is excellent advice here. You don’t have to be a librarian or, even, an everyday bibliophile to be disappointed that the literary dimension promised by the name of Starr’s show rarely amounts to more than a book title being the basis for some more audience participation shenanigans or another piece of bog standard slapstick (usually involving, you guessed it, the performer’s phallus).
In fairness, it’s not all knob gags. At one stage, the bold Antipodean goes highbrow, producing a miniature toy depicting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince from his arsehole.
The difficulty with hating a piece of populist comedy as much as I despise this one is that you are immediately open to accusations of humourlessness and/or prudery. In fact, as Monty Python’s army officer might have said, “nobody enjoys a genuinely surprising bit of genital humour more than I do.”
For instance, I still have a good laugh whenever I remember the moment when the late, great English comedian Malcolm Hardee had the stage at Glastonbury plunged into darkness, only to appear, invisible save for his knob and nipples, which he had daubed with fluorescent paint.
Indeed, I have been (and remain) a very public champion of “Britain’s most controversial comedian” Jerry Sadowitz (who I consider to be the Lenny Bruce of our age). I am confident, therefore, that any reasonable jury would clear me of the charge of dour moralism.
Interestingly, had Sadowitz – who, disgracefully, was cancelled during the 2023 Fringe by the same producer, Pleasance, that is now presenting Starr – put his penis as close to a woman’s face as Starr does early in this show, all Hell would have broken loose. When it comes to consternation and outrage, it seems that mainstream comic nudists are judged by more indulgent standards than intelligent comedians who present a serious challenge to social hypocrisy.
Garry Starr: Classic Penguins can, of course, make the claim to popular appeal. So, too, did the Nuremberg Rallies. What it can’t claim with any justification is to be anything more than low-grade, populist entertainment.
The show has plenty of cultural forebears. It’s like an Australian-accented cross between garbage TV shows Jackass and Eurotrash, comic acrobatics and a barrel scraping, late night cabaret.
If you have read this far, dear reader, I’m delighted that I might just have spared some people of intelligence, taste and discernment from having to encounter Garry Starr’s trash cabaret and, indeed, his anus horribilis.
Until 30 August: pleasance.co.uk
