Zoë Coombs Marr made a splash last year with her first show, Dave, playing an old-school, sexist standup floundering against self-hate and a changing world. Impressive though it was, its satire wasn’t especially close to the bone. I prefer the follow-up, which won the Barry award at Melbourne’s comedy festival. Here, Coombs Marr maintains the burlesque on chauvinism, but adds a timely mickey-take of Doctor Brown-style silent clowning, as Dave tries and fails to reinvent himself for a 2016 crowd.
She also enriches the idea that Dave is experiencing a psychological collapse. Here, under the influence of the fashionable teachings of Ëcole Philippe Gaulier (and of an accidental ecstasy pill), Dave begins to interrogate his relationship with his clown – a cranky thirtysomething lesbian comedian called Zoë. Why does she keep harping on about intersectionality? (“What a boner killer!”) And is he confident that he’s real and she fictional – or might it be vice versa?
“It’s a bloody babushka clown!” howls the terrified Dave, as the show plunges deep into these metafictional layers. But there’s nothing clever-clever about Trigger Warning, which is rocket-fuelled by Coombs Marr’s in-yer-face black comedy as Dave struggles to loop the audience into his gynephobia. The occasional off-colour excess aside, it’s a thrillingly silly portrait of trad standup in the age of sensitivity. Its standout feature, though, is Coombs Marr’s near-the-knuckle spoof of modern clowning, as she plays French carnival music, rolls her pop-eyes at the audience, and fails to imagine all the other things that a banana could be.
• At Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh, until 28 August (not 15 August). Box office: 0131-226 0000.
