“Clever wordplay, visual gags and all completely family friendly”
This is part of a series of shorter reviews from Edinburgh Fringe, August 2026.
Stand-up comic Danny Matinee wastes no time in launching into his jokes – trying to fit 199 jokes into 45 minutes means he has quite the task ahead of him, and the audience have barely had time to settle into their seats before we are bombarded with pun after pun, a mix of clever wordplay, visual gags and all completely family friendly. The jokes are well-crafted but where Matinee struggles is in the delivery, not quite landing the comic timing that would sell these punchlines even better, and trying to build rapport with the audience in a way that often falls flat.
The jokes are divided into sections, so there are themes that connect them, making the show feel like it gradually moves from topic to topic – this isn’t a random selection of one-liners. One section focuses on different occupations, another sees Danny producing different props from a bag, and there is a segment of specially-curated Edinburgh focused jokes. It is all put together so well that it should work a lot better than it does, and there is no denying Matinee’s talent for thinking up the groan-worthy puns that we all love.
But when discussing occupations, he calls out to the audience to see if there are any scientists in the room (for example), and yet has no material prepared for when there is (or isn’t) a response, making one question why he bothered asking in the first place. Another section sees him giving the audience the punchline and asking them to think up the joke – yet the options he gives us are so “out there” that he gets very little response because we can’t think quick enough. Instead, one feels that the punchlines given in this section could be a little more ambiguous with lots of possible answers that would increase audience engagement.
Matinee is undoubtedly capable of bantering with the audience. During the performance that I saw, one lady in the audience asked for a joke about the Loch Ness monster – he immediately quipped that those jokes were “hard to find”. But this is just a single example out of many more failed attempts to enjoy a back-and-forth with audience members. The comedy is clever, but the delivery is lacking.
Tom Morley, August 2026
“199 Jokes Before Lunch Time: Danny Matinee!” plays at 11:50am at Theatre2, theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall until 29th August.
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