By Claire Smith, Jay Richardson

Published 16th Aug 2023, 17:02 BST

Susie McCabe: Femme Fatality ****

Assembly George Square Studios (Venue 17) until 27 August

There’s a lovely bit in Susie McCabe’s show when she takes us to her teenage bedroom. There she’s scrunched up under a duvet, hoping to catch a bit of lesbian action on a television show. For the youngsters in the audience – and there are plenty – she explains that gay depictions on terrestrial TV were so rare in the 1980s, when she was growing up that she can recount them, scene by disappointing scene.

She takes us back to her childhood and her upbringing partly to emphasise how much things have changed – and for the better. McCabe is great at creating word pictures of people and situations. So we meet her diabetic Dad and her dieting mum. And she introduces us to a cast of characters she met during her first career as an electrician working on a building site.

There’s a tremendous warmth in the way she describes other people. In one very funny story Susie helps a younger colleague buy a present for a girlfriend. She’s a generous friend and a loving daughter and you can see she’s an asset to any community. But that’s not to say there haven’t been struggles. McCabe has always battled with her body image – but as a public person she also has to negotiate the cruelty of people on social media.

She appears to be confident and in control – but like all of us she really isn’t – and she’s happy to own up to that. McCabe relies a little too much on the easy laughs from associating lesbians with DIY, but to be fair she needs all the tricks in her toolbox to keep hold of a Friday night crowd who keep wandering in and out of the venue in search of the loo.

But she holds her audience close with stories of everyday life that everyone can relate to. And she ends on a message of hope that brings her warmth right into your heart. Claire Smith

Sophie Sucks Face ****

Underbelly, Bristo Square (Venue 302) until 28 August

Plenty of comics have routines about saying something inappropriate at a funeral. And Sophie Zucker isn't the first to treat her grandfather's passing as yet another gig with her grieving relatives as an audience. Working the room, name-dropping her minor screen roles, stealing focus at the speeches, you intuit that she's exaggerating a need to “seduce” her loved ones for comic effect. She's an egotistical monster, obviously, but a reasonably recognisable one.

But there aren't quite so many comics talking about the incestuous hook-up they also had at such a ceremony, destined to be repeated less than a month later, and then put it into a musical show. The multi-talented American is truly embracing taboo and making a song and dance about it.

Zucker’s ill-advised liaison was made in a marijuana-induced haze with her second cousin, Yanni, a handsome Israeli soldier who'd grown up considerably since they’d last clapped eyes on each other as children. The consequences trouble her. But not so much that she doesn’t entertain the idea of quitting showbusiness and embracing a whole new life of infamy in the Middle East. Matters are really brought to a head when Zucker’s grandmother dies three weeks on from the first funeral, and the comic must confront Yanni and her feelings again.

The sinful tale doesn't really need her weaving elements of the Israel-Palestine conflict into it, or a bitter old aunt introducing the spectre of cancel culture for comedians, though the Jewish comic is wittily sly on both, conscious of how they mean her forbidden love can never flourish.

Zucker retains the hormonal and transgressive rush of the initial moment while couching it in the endlessly spiralling benefits of hindsight, the self-recrimination never quite as appealing as the bad behaviour that prompted it. With some sparing but appealing character act-outs and her showy songs – bold, occasionally overlong but sex-positive in spite of the taboo focus – Sophie Sucks Face is about 80% exhilaratingly fun. Jay Richardson

Edinburgh Festival Fringe comedy reviews: Susie McCabe: Femme Fatality | Sophie Sucks Face