Bella Hull @ Monkey Barrel Comedy

Bella Hull’s latest hour opens tremendously. Alert and intimidating, the SNL UK writer prowls her audience looking for single men to fluster. She has a knack for making even the coolest customers squirm, getting up close and personal and asking them about their medical records. She then ploughs into some tongue-in-cheek mentally unwell Gen Z girlypop gags, which go down a storm before a game-changing reveal.

If the rest of Mad Cow Disease was like the opening, it would hands-down be one of the funniest hours of the festival. Unfortunately, once Hull exposes her fakeout scheme, the stakes drop significantly, presenting us with a perfectly affable Fringe show but one which pales in comparison to its first ten minutes.

Hull goes on to centre in on her relationship with her grandma. Raised in an all-woman household, the comic recalls living with her as a child and being an accomplice to some creatively mad behaviours just to prove a point. Her bit about delivering cake to local women and what she finds in the attic are nicely done, but the menace and bite of the opening fizzles away quickly, diminishing the energy and momentum she’d so brilliantly built up.

The comic playfully hurls stinging barbs at all kinds of women (the shagging flatmate, the now-infirm grandparent), herself included, with her own performative ‘dragging down other women’ completing the set. The takedowns are skillfully done, interwoven with very silly one-liners (including one that will make you reassess Fawlty Towers forever more).

But as the hour draws out, the opening feels left out on a limb despite being thematically relevant. Hull could have easily incorporated her opening shtick into the overall theme, making it a climactic reveal, as opposed to this ‘what you could have won’ game of two halves.

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Bella Hull: Mad Cow Disease, Monkey Barrel Comedy (MB1), until 30 Aug (not 19), 12.30pm, £14.50-£17.50