For comedian Lara Ricote, her race, gender and disability have always been a big part of her identity. That she can “pass” without people noticing any of them. “I’m Latina, but you can’t know it immediately if you just see me, and I’m hard of hearing, but you don’t necessarily know it,” she tells me. “I speak in a weird ass way… but it just seems like I have a cartoonish voice. But really it’s because I’m hard of hearing and I say everything weird, I’m trying to make out the things that I am saying.” The same can be said for her gender, and “how much of a woman I feel”.
She may be young (Ricote’s website describes her as “a twenty-something-year-old”), but Ricote is currently embarking on one of the most highly anticipated Edinburgh Fringe debuts of the summer. This is largely thanks to her title as the reigning winner of the Funny Women award, setting her among titans of the comedy circuit such as London Hughes, Katherine Ryan and Desiree Birch. Ricote never expected to win the 2021 final, which took place on a truly “terrible day”. “I had gotten my hearing aids stuck in my ear… all of it was so s***ty, but then it was so good because that happened,” she says to me over Zoom (for what it’s worth, her voice isn’t that cartoonish). “[Then] I got the opportunity to go to Edinburgh and I was thinking, I don’t even know how ready I am because I’ve never done anything like this. So everything feels like, what the f*** am I doing?... I feel like I’m jumping into the ocean and I’ve got no idea what’s underneath.”
