Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

For her Fringe debut, as is the expectation, Hannah Platt lays out her vulnerabilities: her body dysmorphia, her suicidal thoughts, her long-term denial of her sexuality…

Yet this is no simple trauma dump. It may contain ‘distressing themes’ as the content warning advises, but they are never tackled in a distressing way. She’s not primarily seeking sympathy, but laughs, with the raw authenticity of her material putting power into her many punchlines.

Whatever insecurities she has off-stage, on it, she has grown into a natural performer, coruscating with her wit and refreshingly frank, standing out for being forthright even on a stand-up scene awash with comics talking about their mental health.

A no-nonsense Liverpudlian, she’s also slightly suspicious of getting help. As she points out, she has to say ’therapy’ in a silly voice as if to distance herself from the sort of person who would indulge in such woo-woo. Hilariously, for a woman seeking treatment for her crippling obsession with what people think of her, Platt is convinced her therapist hates her.

And don’t get her started on the vacuous wellness industry. Or rather do, as she’s got a brilliantly dismissive take on this, too. She’s also brutally withering about the sort of woman who would fish for compliments for complaining about their appearance, or the patronising response epitomised by One Direction’s What Makes You Beautiful.

Fear of being judged, of feeling like an outsider, are universal concerns which root even Platt’s extreme example in the relatable. But don’t think your concerns are anything like hers. 

Her body dysmorphia is not just born from internal pressures, and Platt is sharp and insightful on how a woman’s worth is so intrinsically tied to what she looks like. Stand-up – and all the disgusting men in it – is a prime example, she asserts. But who could blame her for seeking validation in the male gaze since that’s how society’s been engineered over the centuries? Only relatively late in life did she ask if she actually wanted that attention.

From the distance of a comedy set, she’s also able to spot the absurdities in her own behaviour and get plenty of laughs from them without being overtly self-deprecating. Her attitude to dates being a case in point.

Her superpower is to be both vulnerable and invincible at the same time. She’s obviously had a lot to battle with, but that has only made her – or at least the stand-up version of her – stronger, less tolerant of the nonsense that has made her real life so miserable and able to strike back with a sharply witty riposte to every bad memory.

This impressive debut fleshes out all these topics, placing them in the context of family life and societal imbalance, through a pacy series of punchy anecdotes that use the pressures of everyday existence to make diamond-quality punchlines.  

Review date: 3 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard