It is rare for an act to firmly establish themselves in UK comedy, and then make their fringe debut. That’s the way round Kemah Bob is doing things, with this maiden Edinburgh outing coming cool on the heels of many a TV gig and years running the FOC It Up! club for female comics of colour. That latter role has situated the UK-based Texan in the vanguard of so-called “woke comedy” – but one of the pleasures of Miss Fortunate is how playful Bob is about her progressive values. Yes it addresses mental health, thereby conforming to generational expectations. But it also sends up our host’s naivety about the world, in its central shaggy-dog story about a trip to Thailand turned holiday from hell.
How well do the two strands intertwine? The holiday story is the meat of the matter here, and the 10 minutes it leaves over, which return to the theme of Bob’s mental wellbeing, feel a bit after the Lord Mayor’s show. But what a show it is, as our host heads to south-east Asia in search of balm for her bipolar anguish. There, halo’ed by cannabis smoke, she ministers to sex workers with sob stories and folds herself under the wing of an African entrepreneur “selling gold to the Asian market”.
With heavy use of dramatic irony, Bob depicts herself here as too in love with her sassiness and liberal sympathies to notice the red flags a-flying. It’s an amusing portrait, of a comedian in crisis at the point where solidarity and social-justice thinking reach the limits of their usefulness. It’s also just a lurid misadventure, which Bob narrowly escapes with the help of Zoom therapy, a marine reservist and the first flight out of Bangkok.
A late pivot towards the subject of her finances (in one of several goofy songs in the show) comes out of the blue. And Bob’s closing hymn to neurodiversity feels, in its earnestness, imperfectly integrated with the capering comedy that precedes it. But Miss Fortunate remains a rollicking debut from a comic who can now add fine fringe show to her many prior accomplishments.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
