Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Mary Beth Barone has wanted to be a performer from a very young age, and the gallery of images and videos that chart her embarrassing, youthful attempts to make it as an actor, singer and/or model are the bedrock of Silly Little Girl.

There’s a limit to how much cringeworthy memories of bad hair and outdated fashions can be milked, and Barone definitely tests it – even if such material always lands hard with her key demographic of twentysomething women.  

But she also has an angle that adds a necessary extra layer since she learned early on that fame requires not just talent but sex appeal. That’s an uncomfortable truth which means she shows herself clumsily approximating a sexual pose at the age of eight, or having professional bikini shots taken at 15. This narrative about the creepy sexism baked into the entertainment business runs alongside laughs at her youthful desperation and the missteps she made in pursuit of her dream.

Barone’s early musical venture, Lay*D*Em, shows her as a 12-year-old songwriter with pitifully low expectations of love. She wrote a poem about 9/11 that achieves Ryan Giggs levels of awfulness, and she was disproportionately proud to be quoted in Rolling Stone giving her opinion on a Justin Timberlake concert – even though the comment was pure cringe.

The pressures to comply with a certain image if she wanted to be famous have had consequences, such as the body dysmorphia she subsequently suffered. And perhaps the expectation to slap on a compliant smile while in the spotlight explains her utterly deadpan stand-up style now. She kicks back against such showbizzy expectations to deliver her material unsmiling, almost unblinking, cold and distant. Comedy was just about the only medium that wasn’t part of her plan to be a star, but she says she has embraced the art form as it gives her permission to be a mess.

Away from the core message, Barone’s material often takes a dip. For example, after seeing an airport sign that said ‘it’s up to you to end human trafficking’, she takes the very obvious route for a stand-up routine to follow.

Elsewhere, she has a distinctive take on the difference between men and women, and hits back hard at a certain misogynistic trope about vaginas. Proudly ‘sex pozzie’, she talks about being bisexual (‘gay people hate your and straight people don’t believe you’) and of being taken in by men’s toxic behaviour that she’s learning to be wise to. The best of this material feature in her superior show, Drag His Ass, a raucously entertaining assault on fuckboy ‘culture’ – if that’s the right word – that has also been playing this Fringe.

Silly Little Girl suffers a little from Barone pushing her agenda over the jokes, and the diminishing returns of embarrassing photographs, especially without a buoyant performance to get some of the material over the line. But her subject matter couldn’t be more relevant and the candour with which she pursues personal stories is appealing.

Review date: 22 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard