Gig review by Steve Bennett at the Leicester Comedy Festival

It’s a terrible name for a club, with a terrible catchline to match: ‘Let the ladies entertain you!’ But poor marketing hasn’t stopped monthly London night Laughing Labia venturing up the M1 for a night at Dave’s Leicester Comedy Festival.

The multinational bill has an Austrian, a Frenchwoman, a Brit and an American walk into a bar. The Austrian is compere Alice Frick, pictured, who’s wide-eyed, enthusiastic and a bit bonkers – bringing an excitable energy to this small audience. Her accented English gives a veneer of naitvity, which helps her cheeky approach.

Natalie Kerrio also has fun with her French accent, boldly telling a gag that depends on the audience understanding an ambiguously pronounced word. She covers some over-familiar targets, and some of her anecdotes would benefit from being tightened up, but she has a mischievously playful attitude, not to mention a dash of oddity, that appeals.

Dr Joseph(ine) Ettrick-Hogg is very insistent about ‘his’ manly credentials, with so much testosterone coursing through ‘his’ veins that it forces ‘his’ moustache to constantly come unstuck from ‘his’ top lip, a dependable slapstick staple. Meanwhile, old-fashioned ironic misogyny takes on a fresh angle when delivered through such a character, and although there’s a bit too much anatomical emphasis in this material, this is a enagagngly idiosyncratic act.

American actress/voiceover artist/comedian Lauren Karl is, with Frick, the brains behind Laughing Labia – though her abysmal headlining set was not a good advert for the venture. She’s a lesbian and a vegan, so pretty much every line was a gag about not eating meat or what she will wrap her lips around. Though to be fair there were also some tediously unoriginal comments about Britain being full of drizzle and binge drinkers. Her Californian chutzpah couldn’t disguise the mechanical delivery of such dreary material.

Review date: 10 Feb 2014
Reviewed by:
Reviewed at: Leicester The Looking Glass