One of the most gifted joke writers of our age, Celya AB has been through several subtle metamorphoses since debuting at the Fringe only a couple of years ago.

Her first show Swimming had a lot of the standard cultural differences observations that you’d expect from a debuting French comic, while in her second hour, Second Rodeo, she claimed ‘I do whimsy now’ and proceeded to drop an all killer set of idiosyncratic bangers, including one of my personal favourite ever observations: ‘If I google synonyms, please don’t also show me antonyms. It’s presumptuous.’

In her new show, Of All People we discover that the whimsy actually came out of a tough year, which is unfortunately a theme she shares with a lot of comics at this year’s Fringe. Seems like 2022/23 wasn’t easy on many of us.

AB’s personal crisis led to a realisation that women having breakdowns are not well-represented in media. The women she sees on screen are likely to react to trauma by cutting themselves a fringe, drinking a single beer and ‘dancing alone in a flat that she owns.’  It sounds like a dream to AB, whose own breakdown was marked by a diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following depersonalisation, suicidal thoughts and weight fluctuations.

Although this is undoubtedly her most honest show, AB uses a lot of fancy footwork to dance up to the edge of the personal stuff without letting it overwhelm the jokes. Experimenting with serious stakes in her writing for the first time, she’s sometimes too ginger. During the climax, she attempts to incorporate an emotional resolution tied to her family history, but she hasn’t given us quite enough detail on the topic for the moment to be meaningful. 

That structural issue aside, the jokes themselves remain sublimely elegant – a section on the oddities of courtrooms has some lovely observations, and showcases her great comedic talent for questioning accepted norms. And while there are kinks to work out, the story of her grandparents and how they met in Algeria brings out a romantic dimension in her thinking.

The audience begins to see her as a person and a product of her environment rather than the floating joke orb she’s been in previous shows. As always, it will be fascinating to see where she goes next. At the moment, her joke-writing wizardry and her desire to be vulnerable are two bodies orbiting each other, coming closer than ever this year but still not quite touching. When they do, we’ll be looking at a supernova.