Can you be funny and good-looking? You’d think the question barely needs asking – but Elouise Eftos has done so, and received quite the reaction. She makes a stellar fringe debut with Australia’s First Attractive Comedian, a tongue-in-cheek title some have treated, by her account, as no laughing matter.
Should we be surprised the relationship between comedy, feminism and sexiness isn’t as resolved as we might have thought? In the space between them, the Perth comic makes great stacks of hay here, in a show premised on her extreme hotness. She chats to an audience member; we cut away to the erotic Elouise Eftos fantasy unfolding in that person’s head. She demonstrates the yawning gulf between herself and “normies”. She jokes about cat-calls, and the expulsion from the Beatles of handsome Pete Best. She makes common cause with her fellow bombshell, that innocent bank-teller turned patron saint of making wives jealous, Dolly Parton’s Jolene.
Is it all a hilarious wind-up? Or are we to take Eftos’s lofty self-image at face value? The show’s neat trick is to be equally funny regardless, or because, of that ambiguity. Either way, Eftos has nailed a wickedly amusing and original stage persona, sky-high self-regard but charm in spades too, all flashed smiles, tossed hair and matter-of-fact superiority to we lesser mortals in her crowd.
And, unlike beauty, the show is not only skin deep. In its later stages, Eftos keeps pushing her ideas – and what we might think about them – into material about sex, her body and a final sequence, in character as a malfunctioning “femmebot”, that implies some unstated ambiguity about the role she’s choosing (or has been forced?) to play.
There’s also a questioning routine about the act’s feminist credentials, which get sharply challenged by one or two senior female comedians – whose shocking correspondence with Eftos is displayed on an upstage screen. Impudence – towards her elders, towards the comedy industry at large – is a feature of this fabulous provocation of a comedy hour, nipping and tucking at our ambivalent relationship with good looks.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
