Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

A timely prophetic wake-up call about the existential dangers of artificial intelligence – all delivered by a woman in fishnets and kinky PVC lingerie – Vanessa 5000 is a powerhouse performance from LA clown Courtney Pauroso.

She demonstrates an amazing physicality, starting with jerky mechanical movements but becoming increasingly lithe with every update, ultimately cartwheeling across the space. And all this in vertiginous stripper heels. 

With her cold, robotic voice and dead eyes, this sex robot is far from erotic. Even if she has been designed to cater to every male desire, the lack of humanity is an inescapable design flaw. Are sex robots only ever going to be glorified fleshlights?

This show is her in demonstration mode, showing her full capabilities, even down to a Victor Meldrew impersonation, if that’s your very niche kink. And to show off what she can do, she needs potential customers, which is how audience members come to be roped in for increasingly outlandish skits, most notably acting out a stepmom porn fantasy. Her algorithms told her that’s what her owner wants, having scanned all his data to optimise his experience.  

Pauroso is very good at persuading - or strong-arming – people to participate. At one point, when one man is asked for a response, he meekly offers: ‘What I am I supposed to say?’ which very much shows where the balance of power lies between the performer and the audience, and also between the robot and its so-called master.

As the Vanessa 5000 is updated she becomes increasingly human-like – and sinister – as the real motives for that information harvesting become more apparent. She can screw you in more ways than one. For while you might think this was going to be a satire on subservient, emotionless sex robots being a vacuous male fantasy, it’s a broader cautionary tale about the ethical void at the heart of Big Tech.

And when the next generation Vanessa 6000 arrives, she has new levels of operation, including rock guitar skills and the manic ‘chaos mode’ to inject even more crazed energy into an already high-octane show.

There are jokes in here, but it's the intensity of the performance that sweeps all puny human resistance aside. Finally, the audience are totally in thrall to the sex robot, and the more fragile human performer revealed to be beneath her wipe-clean skin.

Review date: 22 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard