Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

This show has become something of a work in progress for Kate Hammer, who has been hastily re-writing it after she found that early audiences were convinced she believed she really was Bruce Willis‘s daughter – and so feared for her mental well-being. 

In fact, this is a story of her search for meaning in a family in which she didn’t feel she belonged, growing up on a goat farm in rural Canada. Instead of accepting this as her reality, her active young imagination decided that there must be more, and that the Hollywood icon could have hooked up with her teacher mum while filming nearby.

Now she has used that childhood daydream as the starting point for a list of reasons why the action hero could be her father, all of them tenuous. It feels like a reasonable linking idea, if not a reasonable argument, but any material contrived to fits this tenuous template feels strained in a way the more authentic stories don’t.

Performing in a Die Hard-style vest, Hammer reflects on her closest relatives, has a self-deprecating bit about picking fights with toddlers, and interrogates her bisexuality, which leads to more probing material about how we seek out emotionally unavailable people as they are some sort of conquest. But generally, this show puts storytelling above philosophising.

The one-women sketches often strain, too, and sometimes based too much of an in-joke. It’s pretty hack to do a spoof charity appeal, and her ‘sponsor a comedian’ ad, seems needy. Meanwhile, imagining Bruce Willis doing a tight five minutes at his local comedy club is better in conception than execution.

But Hammer is much better than this currently messy show, her very own Hudson Hawk.

She has great charisma and dynamism, both physical and verbal, even when the audience is small, which means she’s is easily able to hold our attention. When she talks, sans gimmicks, about her life, it’s fun and engaging, even without quickfire punchlines. She’s just got to learn to let Bruce go…

• Bruce Willis Is My Dad is on at Laughing Horse @ The Brass Monkey at 2.45pm

Review date: 22 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Brass Monkey