Edinburgh Fringe comedy reviews: Chloe Petts: How You See Me, How You Don’t | Kemah Bob: Miss Fortunate + more

Chloe Petts: How You See Me, How You Don’t | Matt Stronge

Chloe Petts: How You See Me, How You Don’t ★★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Not all lesbians are head girls, but all head girls are lesbians, jokes Chloe Petts – herself a proud former holder of this particular branch of “public office”.

In this quality hour of stand-up, Petts, who is one of the most accomplished stand-ups working in the UK today, spins comedy gold out of her own personal and professional experiences.

The latter focuses on work she was doing for Sky Sports News. She started doing a guest slot during the women’s Euros in 2022, and was so funny and good at it that they gave her her own segment on Saturdays. Problem was, many of the men of the internet weren’t used to seeing someone who looked like her presenting sports; they couldn’t see the point of a woman they weren’t sexually interested in being on their screens and she came in for a torrent of online abuse.

This is no trauma show, though. She doesn’t so much gloss over it as laugh at the trolls’ stupidity, fluently proving what a superior talent she is.

The charismatic comic demonstrates her wide appeal with a range of great material – a lot of it about her sexuality. From the woeful school education about sapphic relationships to this being the golden age of the butch lesbian (as bisexual women realise they can access the masculinity they desire without the involvement of men), she’s got a lot of fertile ground to cover and she does it with easy charm.

There’s a wonderful bit in which she imagines being given a makeover by Queer Eye, except the experts have been replaced by straight men, and her material about enjoying “professional touching” – airport security and when having your feet measured, for example – is mischievously strong

Chloe Petts is one of those people who makes comedy look easy. You might already have seen her on Have I Got News For You, and hopefully there will be bigger, troll-free broadcast vehicles for her talents.

Ashley Davies

Kemah Bob: Miss Fortunate ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Texan import Kemah Bob has a relatively high profile on the UK stand-up circuit and a considerable number of broadcast credits, but it's only mildly surprising that her Fringe debut has been so long in coming.

With an appealing, upfront persona that marries impregnable confidence and almost wilfully childlike naivety, bold assertions and significant disclaimers, the bipolar stand-up recounts an epic tale of misadventure while holidaying in Thailand.

As a queer, sex positive woman with an appetite for adventure, she's stung by - but brushes off - the racism she encounters, wandering around in a marijuana fug and Pollyannaish haze of perceiving the best in people who clearly wish her ill.

Particularly endangered by her first world saviour complex towards sex workers, the tale is shared with an ongoing flurry of red flags and she breezily relates bad decision after bad decision.

There are moments of genuine peril and Bob can chide her obliviousness in retrospect. Yet she fills in the family background to her challenged mental health and manic episodes, engendering sympathy, even as she appears reassuringly in control now.

The force of her personality needs to occasionally compensate for undercooked writing, but this is a solid introduction to her talent.

Jay Richardson

Emma Sidi is Sue Gray ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Imagine if Sue Gray, the senior civil servant in charge of the Partygate investigation and now Downing Street chief of staff, was a “hun” – a woman who loved gossip, TK Maxx and procrastinating on YouTube.

Emma Sidi has created a brilliant character who’s all of this and more: someone who says Keir Starmer as “dripping in rizz”, gets annoyed by Rishi Sunak’s office jokes, and slags off former head of the Metropolitan Police Cressida Dick for not having been a “girls’ girl” at university.

Gray describes with glee the wave of minor celebrity she rides after having submitted her big report (the redacted bits are outrageously funny), with perks including free tickets to ABBA Voyage and cocaine with a particular celebrity. Oh, the drama – she loves it. It’s wonderful, unusual comedy, bursting with delight in the detail.

And some great watercooler moments involving mild audience interaction give Sidi – who’ll be on the next series of Taskmaster – a chance to improvise a little.

The only problem here is that it’s something of a stretch to fill the hour. One suspects Sidi knows this – hence the inclusion of some brilliantly surreal material delivered in Spanish (how she makes it all understandable to people who don’t speak that language is nothing short of genius), which helps break things up.

It’s a lot of silly fun from an absurdly clever comic.

Ashley Davies

 

Full Frontal Lobe ★★★

Brewdog Doghouse (Venue 603) until 25 August

Lizzie Lenco has a trigger warning at the top of her show, but so long as you are cool with car crashes, blood, drugs, brain injuries, and all things goth then you will be just fine. Unless the typhoid and minge waxing puts you off.

This is a great venue – even the little dog in the audience beside me is happy. Lenco offers up nicely dry, mostly dark humour. But I think when you have been cut from the wreckage of your Volkswagen Polo (look out for Lizzie's catchy singalong song on the subject), you get to be dark. Audiences will be asked about their bowel movements, enjoy joining in with Blind Goth Yoga and share the song they want played if they are ever in a coma.

It is all comfortably low key (well, the women is in a wheelchair) but, in its own way, high energy. Lizzie hates enforced positivity and kneejerk (by those who can still jerk their knees) use of the words 'brave' and 'inspirational'. I hope she would not mind the use of the term 'impressive'.

There is cake at the end of the show and, if you are lucky, as were are today, you may get a miracle too.

Kate Copstick

Vlad Illich: Vladislav, Baby Don't Hurt Me ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) until 25 August

Vlad Illich is straining to do several different things in his consistently funny and ambitious Fringe debut but regrettably, they're pulling in different directions.

The North Macedonian appreciates that he needs to educate most about his homeland and offers a potted history of the country, contextualising its tensions with its neighbours and the erstwhile threat of war. At the same time, he's sharing his personal and family backstory, how he came to be a comedian in London via Malta and Ayr, and the constant that chess has his been in his life, its history and meaning.

All the while though, he's dipping into the generic “immigrant” caricature of his club sets, at times naively falling foul of prejudice, and elsewhere, exploiting it, making broad satirical jabs at Broken Britain being in a worse state than ex-Soviet satellite nations.

It's these cartoonish, less sincere aspects that sit most awkwardly with his tale of reconnecting with his schizophrenic father through chess, the clash of tone never satisfyingly resolved.

Regardless, there's still plenty to enjoy here from the intermittently smart and goofy stand-up, with Vladislav, Baby Don't Hurt Me feeling like a sweeping introduction he has to blast through in order to focus his career.

Jay Richardson