A review of Mike Rice: Cruel Little Man, Fringe 2025

The Kilkenny native is as darkly twisted as ever, selling out his run and winning fans with sharply layered gags and frantic energy. Co-hosting a podcast with Vittorio Angelone and landing a Channel 4–produced YouTube series alongside other rising comedy stars, this already feels like his year.

The breakdown

Mike Rice is not well. Or so he insists, wiping sweat from his forehead barely fifteen minutes into his show. He opened with Diddy – the man of the hour – before recounting how he devised a scheme to sneak drugs through airport security. Any sane person would sweat under that kind of pressure. Rice doubles down, playing the spectacle of his own collapse.

He is a comic built on chaos, the kind of man who shamelessly admits to going alone to Bridget Jones, or to the unexpected pleasures of a massage from a muscular man. He confesses that he’s better off in a relationship, though a recent breakup pushed him into a solo trip to Spain.

There, he tells us, he encountered a cheeky sausage dog, which he describes as “a sausage dog in more ways than one”. The tale spirals into a fever dream seduction in which, to his own horror and delight, he almost wants the dog to succeed.

Rice recounts acid trips with manic charm, including one where his altered sense of self collides with family reality in ways that only heighten the absurdity. “Just ride it out,” he says, a suggestion less convincing to those around him.

Structure and flow

He shifts from absurd anecdotes to teasing the front row before jumping back into the main story. Every routine is full of devices: impressions of Italian men harassing women, of Latinas, and even of the infamous orange man in the White House.

Punchlines stack within punchlines, each setting up bigger laughs. It is easier to count the moments the audience is silent, waiting for the next gag, than the ones they are laughing.

Angles and edge

His characters are as frantic as he is. One recurring figure is a deviant who walks with locked knees and stiffened arms, mouth contorted in a high-pitched wail. Rice’s energy is so contagious that his own anxiety makes the entire room feel on edge with him.

What makes him stand out is not just the subject matter – dick jokes, Trump, sex, even the odd scatological aside – but the angles he finds. These are topics that in other comics’ hands would feel hack. Rice makes them feel fresh, carried by an unhinged warmth that lets him get away with clarifying to an audience member that yes, he was just making a joke about poo.

The lasting impression

Rice lives off his nerves. He shields himself with vulnerability and then parades it before us, a man who wants to be cool but ends up being more like Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun, a clown you can’t help but feel sorry for, even as you howl with laughter.

He calls himself a “cruel little man”, yet beneath the perverse edge lies a deeply sensitive performer. That, more than anything, is what keeps you hooked.