Tuesday August 19th 2025
Matt Parker
Written by Midlothian View Reporter, Liam Eunson
Best-selling author and popular YouTube mathematician, Matt Parker, has graced this year’s Fringe with a comedic twist on complex mathematics and algorithms with his show, ‘Getting Triggy With It’.
Finding humour in complicated maths and coding, Parker takes the audience through a journey of his ‘mathimatical’ life, touching on his success and career as a mathemitician, mainly focusing on humourous stories and jokes that have come out of his failures in solving complicated mathematical challenges. Displaying a unique performance that combined both maths and comedy, he had the sold-out Pleasance Beyond audience both laughing and thinking.
Starting as a maths teacher, Matt Parker has used his skills and love for maths to grow a popular YouTube channel, sell-out books, and now perform a complex but entertaining comedic maths show that centres around his successes and failures in his beloved field.
Parker is able to turn his failures into self-depricating comedy gold, using his obsession for maths and his never resting brain of numbers and symbols to perform a show that both highlights his achievements and belittles his failures.
With humour from the beginning, Parker opened his show pretending he hadn’t yet had time to log into his laptop that displayed a comically long security system. This set the tone for the show, introducing comedy before he had yet dived into complex maths.
Talking a lot about maths, he was able to lighten the complex subject matter with simple humour, balancing out the show. Aside from the comedy, the stories about maths were made more entertaining with the use of background stories and props, with one even including a robot he had made for a DJ set he performed at Alex James’ (bassist for Blur) festival.
A large portion of his show was about his achievement of solving a complex problem in 31 days being beaten by fans of his YouTube channel until the point where someone, using coding, solved the problem in less than a second. This was a perfect example of his belittling self-depricating humour, creating great humour out of being completely beaten.
Sharing his mathematical discoveries and showcasing unreleased findings that have yet to be published, the performer’s genius and abilities shined through, providing a simple explanation and analysis to extremely complex maths that allowed everyone in the audience to understand the show’s contents.
With a projector screen in the background, Parker displays all of his equations to the audience, using his laptop to run the audience through Python coding and diagrams that visualises the maths he is explaining.
Despite the show being littered with great stand-up, this show isn’t for people who aren’t lovers of maths. Matt Parker does an incredible job of explaining the audience what is going on, assisted by great use of the background scenes.
His nerdy nature was accompanied by humourous stand-up that gave a preview into his manic and mathematical mind. With the use of equations and complex maths, Matt Parker’s show, ‘Getting Triggy With It’, takes mathematics and makes it fun and humorous.
£14.50 full price and is performed every evening from 6:30pm at Pleasance Courtyard – Beyond
4/5, creative and hilarious show but may not be for everyone due to the concept.
