Reportedly the fastest comedian to sell out on this year’s fringe, Katherine Ryan is the woman of the moment – a Live at the Apollo veteran and panel-show fixture whose standup act is growing in assurance. Her new show Kathbum – touring after the fringe – could hardly represent a more naked bid to inherit Joan Rivers’s mantle as the wicked witch of gossip comedy. It’s gleefully astringent and amoral. But, just occasionally, those attitudes ring superficial and the show feels a little unformed.
It’s a show of two halves that starts with an onslaught of celeb abuse. Think Marina Hyde’s Lost in Showbiz live onstage, and you’ll be close to Ryan’s opening 20 minutes, which elicits as many gasps as laughs, and plenty of both. There’s a riff on the Taylor Swift/Nicki Minaj row, casting the former as an old-school, deep south racist. Cheryl Cole gets it in the neck; Peter Andre, in the groin. The standout may be her (inevitable) Bill Cosby section, mocking Cosby’s sensitivity to interview questions about rape, and imagining herself the grateful recipient of a sex attack at the hands of Tina Fey.
The frisson of breached decorum is palpable and thrilling, even if now and then the cruelty (calling Cheryl Cole “garbage”) or insubstantiality jars. Her Cecil the Lion gag is a good one, but it’s as conspicuously uninterested as the media itself in the world that that news story briefly illuminated.
The second half of the show is about recent developments in Ryan’s life, and about her Canadian background. Its least effective section concerns a recent Twitterstorm over a joke Ryan made about Filipinos. In an age of near constant comedy outrage, this kind of mea not culpa is becoming a familiar standup trope, and – here as elsewhere – it’s uneasy to see a comedian use the privileges of her position to cast herself as the victim. Less contentious are her recent dating and parenting stories – the mildest part of the show, but often droll. On her daughter’s unexpected English accent: “The British are sneaking into their own country through my body.”
In a thematically disjointed set, the climax takes us back to Ryan’s Canadian hometown for her sister’s recent hen party. Her cynical persona rings a little less hilarious here, as Ryan despises the people of her hometown, mainly for not recognising her own brilliance. A closing maid of honour speech is more attractive, because it balances the brutality with some tenderness of feeling. Ryan is brilliant at the barbed comedy of supercilious abuse. But that’s hard to sustain, and fuses imperfectly here with material suggestive of the pleasant woman behind the merciless mask.
- At the Stand, Edinburgh, until 22 August. Box office: 0131-558 7272.
