When Chloe Petts got a regular Saturday morning slot on Sky Sports News, it was a dream come true for the comic, an ardent football fan. Will it surprise you to learn that this “6ft 1in lesbian with a wide-leg trouser and a functional shirt” was not embraced by Sky’s football audience? How You See Me, How You Don’t tells the story of Petts’ moment in the sports broadcasting spotlight, abused online by those outraged at her difference from the channel’s hetero norms. It folds in teenage material too, about the 30-year-old’s stint as head girl, and the roots of the resilience she drew on when the harassers circled.
It’s a deeply sympathetic hour of comedy – but not a sad one, because Petts rises above the fray with perky humour unbowed. You might even cast that as a flaw in the show, in that her affable manner and “they go low, we go high” spirit lowers the dramatic stakes. The final address to her trolls doesn’t hit as hard as it might. But most of what precedes it is entirely compelling, as Petts enthuses about “professional touching”, hymns a golden age for butch lesbians, and recalls schooling at an all-girl state school in Kent – “as if Enid Blyton wrote Skins”, she jokes, but also an oddly impervious age of innocence where her identity could unselfconsciously develop.
Not for the first time with this comic and, understandably, there’s a lot of gender material here too. Petts – always an insightful commentator on this topic – memorably identifies hers as neither male nor female, but rather as the doubt she sows in the minds of her online tormentors. Added to schooldays material that recalls her 2023 set, it does mean How You See Me … feels like a consolidation rather than an advance on her earlier shows. Like them, it’s a highly engaging, consistently intelligent hour of autobiographical standup, by a comic so at home onstage and with whom it’s a keen pleasure to spend time. If a vocal section of the Sky Sports audience couldn’t see that – well, their loss is live comedy’s gain.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh until 25 August
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