Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

In the basement of the City Café, a small group of German and American tourists are asked to stand and salute for the entrance of Helen Prior, a Russian-Ukrainian art historian with a supremely ill-advised and confused comedy lecture about Soviet history. 

While much of Prior’s show rails at authoritarian abuses of power, asking us to salute and clap for her material feels like it’s in a similar ballpark.

One of the show’s earliest issues is the perplexing pairing of genocide with raunchy cathouse humour. Having emigrated to the UK in 1989, Prior is still carrying some of the scars of communism. She’s keen to critique the tenets of socialism and the atrocities committed in its name, all the while groping herself and saying things like ‘my preferred adjectives are moist and beach babe’ which scan as jokes for half a second before collapsing in on themselves. 

To an extent, you can imagine her as an effective lecturer in history, as it’s clearly a topic she knows a lot about, but her attempts to make comedy out of the subject are reminiscent of reading yellowing satirical texts from another time. Esoteric references and wildly mixed metaphors are sloshed together with wild abandon until there’s nothing left to make sense of.

It’s a deeply enervating combination, so it almost comes as a welcome shot of caffeine when she starts lapsing into some broad right-wing talking points. ‘You can’t even hug someone these days,’ she says in all seriousness. ‘Modern women think they’re being assaulted if someone gave them a box of chocolates 30 years ago.’ Okay, go off queen.

I was not expecting this to turn into Ricky Gervais’ Twitter feed, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Both parties seem to be in flight from the censorship of Soviets now long gone.

As the goodwill rapidly drains out of the room, Prior revs up for some deeply incoherent contemporary political material, grinding her axe with ‘benefits cheats’ and showing us photos of herself proudly posing alongside Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage, before going on to shit talk them both. Theresa May is described as having ‘an enormously grotesque clitoris that has bewitched Jeremy Corbyn away from Diane Abbott.’ Maybe that means something to someone. Now is the time for this show, she tells us, because Keir Starmer is about to hand the UK over to Putin via the trans community. 

Prior describes herself as ‘an old Soviet tank’ who ‘can blow a hole in your anxiety and depression,’ and she’s at least right that her comedy sometimes feels a bit like a wound to the brain.  I left the show with a splitting tension headache behind the eyes, which is a first for me as a comedy viewer.

Review date: 23 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ City Cafe