Kathy Maniura's solo Edinburgh debut is a niche within a niche, even for the Fringe, featuring character comedy performed as anthropomorphised, talking objects.

In Objectified, Maniura portrays an annoying Californian paper straw, an electric scooter desperate to be unlocked, and a wine bottle with Mafioso intensity. But it's the 27-year-old as an AirPod earpiece with manic pixie dream girl energy that tends to elicit the strongest reactions.

“She's weird, sexy and she keeps getting lost. She's so chaotic,” Maniura explains. “People like different characters. Yet sometimes a cluster of friends will laugh in a way that suggests they know this person. I'm always excited to get to the AirPod because she just gets sexier and weirder. Some find it horrible but others absolutely love it. Maybe it just says the most about my audience.”

Comedian Kathy Maniura is making her solo Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2023

Enchanted objects hark back to fairytales of course. But Objectified's origins are grim rather than Grimm. In 2021, Maniura suffered tonsillitis so severe that she almost died.

“An abscess behind my tonsil was draining pus into my chest and they couldn't work out what was wrong with me for a while,” she recalls. “I started doing the objects a few months after I got out of hospital. In the show I frame it as if I woke up from the surgery with this gift.” More prosaically though, “I was definitely just sitting, looking around me a lot, somewhat cheesily glad to be alive. I've always had an eye for the silly and maybe the experience enhanced that process of noticing fun little things in the world.”

Shunning the label “whimsical”, fearing it too close to “twee”, Maniura cites The Mighty Boosh as one of her earliest “formative touchstones”. As herself, in the transitions between the objects' two-minute appearances, she waggishly reflects on the preceding absurdity in the most blasé manner.

“What makes the Boosh endearing is the obvious, underlying friendship between Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt,” she observes. “And I'm not one of those performers who completely disappears into a character, there's always a bit of self-awareness around it, a nudge and a wink.” Although not a big part of the show, her recuperation from surgery bookends the hour. “With this level of absurdity, it grounds it a bit and maybe explains why I do what I do.”

With Derek Mitchell, Maniura is part of her own double act, Horseplay. The duo brought the afterlife playlet Bareback to the Fringe last year and are the only members of their once eight-strong Oxford Revue sketch group who are still performing.

Despite her Oxbridge background, an erstwhile marketing role for Tate Britain and her privileged-sounding accent, it's a common misconception that the state school-educated Maniura is posh. Still, as she jokes in her show, “as a white, middle-class woman, people would rather watch me pretend to be an AirPod than talk about myself”.

She has tried performing straight stand-up, but “this sounds really harsh on myself. I don't feel like I have much interesting to say.”

Character comedy, she says, can “be quite brutal. But at least if audiences don't like it, you can blame it on the character. And perhaps I'm biased but I think the pay-off can be bigger. If an audience really engages, you can create this whole world where the laughs come thicker and faster.”

Although she's a young woman performing a show called Objectified, this isn't a political hour. At least, not explicitly so. “With women in comedy, and this is true of any marginalised group, it often feels like there's a need to explain yourself, to justify why you're on stage,” she argues. “So historically, sketch goofiness has tended to be the preserve of men. But I love watching woman just doing silly stuff for the sake of it.”

Maniura isn't doing her most established character - an angry, entitled middle-aged urban cyclist that helped her to the 2021 final of the So You Think You're Funny? competition and has become a mainstay of her Instagram and TikTok channels - in case he undermine the show's concept. But she has belatedly started doing him at drag nights. And the bisexual comic sees Objectified as “a very queer show in its sensibility”. “Queer as in weird. But also in terms of self-expression. I don't think it's coincidence that it plays really well with queer audiences.”

It's sometimes said that bisexual people are constantly having to come out to clarify their sexuality. And Maniura perceives some parallels with her debut here too.

“There's isn't necessarily an obvious link between the objects. Yet for whatever reason, they jumped out at me as being interesting and having something interesting to say. They're all misunderstood, disliked or just ignored, so they feel the need to speak out. And that's pretty queer. Which all sounds a bit serious when I'm pretending to be a paper straw.”

Kathy Maniura: Objectified, Gilded Balloon Teviot Wee Room, 4.40pm, until 28 August.

How a medical emergency, and the Mighty Boosh, inspired Kathy Maniura's solo Fringe comedy debut