A standup’s debut show usually tells us who they are, then with their follow-up, they branch out. Kemah Bob has done things the other way around. After 2024’s Miss Fortunate, a wild shaggy dog story about a disastrous trip to Thailand, she now delivers that delayed “this is me” set, an open-hearted inquiry into how she got here and her origins as the child of a poor black family, the descendants of slavery, in the southern US.
That inquiry is prompted by misgivings on Bob’s part, coolly laid out here, about her career in comedy – which she loves, but worries is infantilising, and (see the receipts from that successful last fringe run) financially precarious. Is she leading a grownup life – or should she start doing so? There’s a thinking-aloud authenticity to that exploration that is very endearing in Love Child. Her audience cheerfully used as a sounding board, she casts her gaze back across generations of Bobs, and her own journey to the UK, to work out what life she ought now to lead.
Part of the pressure, she jokes, comes from being the product of the first pregnancy her parents didn’t terminate. She measures her upbringing against the Adverse Childhood Experience test for early-life trauma and it doesn’t sound too traumatic because Bob is such a smiling and playful host, packing icky jokes about inheriting “dick-sucking lips” from her dad or, as an adult, sharing sex toys with her mum.
She goes on to ruminate on what made her parents who they were (there’s a great joke about her father’s having never been taught to be a man) – and her grandad too, a promiscuous blues singer with an addictive personality just like Kemah’s. When this chronology loops back to the present-day party at which Bob first sets her scene, it’s a jolt. That framing device could use some buttressing but the material is strong, in a thoughtful, sprightly show.
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At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August
