Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

She’s cheerful, winsome and speaks with the sweet cartoon-like voice of one of the cuter Muppets – all of which are likely to make you underestimate Lara Ricote. For this Fringe newcomer has a sharp comic mind, a mischievously dark sense of humour and the timing of a stand-up veteran.

But then her debut is all about her not being what others expect. The title GRL/LATNX/DEF defines her primary identities as a girl (as opposed to a woman), Mexican-American and deaf. However, she can be mistaken for white, and her degenerative condition is not visible, making her ‘disability-lite’ by her definition.

So it’s a ‘this is me’ calling card to the comedy community, but with a twist. The bedrock is her family, a Mexican mum with very niche religious beliefs, and a father who’s Venezuelan but is now defined almost entirely by being an anti-vaxxer. 

She also has two sisters, one who is also, by sheer coincidence, also deaf, and the other who suffers from the far more debilitating condition of being stupid. Ricote doesn’t hold back on giving her sibling shit for that, typical of the blunt speaking that defines the hour. And the word ‘stupid’ manages to both delightful and bluntly insulting in the comedian’s accent.

Ricote has interesting things to say about her ethnicity, too, not realising she was a ‘person of colour’ until she moved from Latin-American-dominated Miami to Europe. And the GRL part of the triptych is covered by routines about her sexual hangs-up, inherited from her mother, that made her a late developer.

That also might explain why, faced with the prospect of a long-distance relationship, she impulsively boarded a plane to Australia in pursuit of her boyfriend. She doesn’t quite interrogate these actions much, and this routine leads, weirdly, into a dark ditty about organ theft that proves a baffling ‘hang on, what?’ moment. 

She insists it’s a topic that’s not spoken about enough and she needs to get it out into the open, at whatever cost. The same goes for her repeatedly slipping into routines about climate change, a subject of such catastrophic urgency she feels guilty to have not dedicated her whole show to it. As it is, these interruptions are clunky and unwelcome, so we can only be grateful she didn’t go down that route.

They contribute to the second half of the show being notably more inconsistent after the riveting and witty opening sections that not only establish her existing identities, but establish her as a droll and exciting new comic voice. Given that she likes metaphors for global warming, here’s one for her: she’s often dry, occasionally on fire, and likely to spread around the planet.

• Lara Ricote: GRL/LATNX/DEF is on at Monkey Barrel Comedy at The Hive at 3.20pm

Review date: 19 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)