Kemah Bob: Miss Fortunate review – a rollicking Edinburgh fringe debut

Kemah Bob: Miss Fortunate review – a rollicking Edinburgh fringe debut

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The Texan comedian delivers a playful show about a holiday from hell that tackles mental health and wokeness

It is rare for an act to firmly establish themselves in UK comedy, and then make their fringe debut. That’s the way round Kemah Bob is doing things, with this maiden Edinburgh outing coming cool on the heels of many a TV gig and years running the FOC It Up! club for female comics of colour. That latter role has situated the UK-based Texan in the vanguard of so-called “woke comedy” – but one of the pleasures of Miss Fortunate is how playful Bob is about her progressive values. Yes it addresses mental health, thereby conforming to generational expectations. But it also sends up our host’s naivety about the world, in its central shaggy-dog story about a trip to Thailand turned holiday from hell.

How well do the two strands intertwine? The holiday story is the meat of the matter here, and the 10 minutes it leaves over, which return to the theme of Bob’s mental wellbeing, feel a bit after the Lord Mayor’s show. But what a show it is, as our host heads to south-east Asia in search of balm for her bipolar anguish. There, halo’ed by cannabis smoke, she ministers to sex workers with sob stories and folds herself under the wing of an African entrepreneur “selling gold to the Asian market”.

At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August

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