Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If Sarah Millican’s just not bawdy enough for you, try Lindsey Santoro, who has taken the baton of dirty-talking stand-up and run with it.

Explaining that her debut has none of the emotive story arc supposed to be vital for a Fringe show, she introduces her comedy as ‘mainly about my fanny and my husband’s knob’ - and she’s not wrong.

The blunt-talking Brummie, distinctive in her Barbie-pink hair, is not  just unapologetic in talking about her sex life, cervical smears or the finer biological aspects of her nipples - she takes pure pride in sharing all the grubby details, often with an earthy cackle of glee at her own indiscretion.

A call-out for any women under 25 in the audience goes unanswered, and not entirely surprisingly. This is base comedy for the older, unembarrassable generation only too familiar with every way your body can let you down. She doesn’t have vicarious bedroom thrills to share, instead her outlook is from a position where sex loses all sense of occasion and mystique. Yet it can still be awkward, as her hot-tub tale attests.

Some stories have familiar bases, such as the delights of the drugs she took to get her through labour. And hers was the second ‘how we’d have to send dick pics back in my day’ routine I’d heard in as many days, but this hackneyed premise leads to some more hilariously distinctive material about using Instagram filters –  told with typical ebullience -  that has the whole room imagining her husband’s Photoshopped penis.

Santoro occasionally moves away from the sort of filth that might even make fellow West Midlander Frank Skinner blush, with descriptive routines that serve as a vivid celebration of working-class life, notably in a long story about a hen do that takes in a strip show and Dirty Dancing classes, even if this is lighter on laughs and more predictable than her grubbier routines.

In relating this yarn, she portrays herself as an inherently lazy gossip, prone to oversharing her judgemental verdicts on people, just as she overshares the details of her sex life, to which she inevitably returns.

The best bits of Pink Tinge are all on a similar theme, but Santoro knows who she is and what makes her roar with laughter. And if gleefully graphic tales are up your street, this comedy natural and talented goat impersonator will absolutely deliver.

Review date: 8 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett