Kemah Bob: Love Child review – Miss Fortunate’s follow-up is a superbly playful origin story

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh With icky and edgy jokes, the comedian offers an authentic inquiry into her childhood in her sophomore show A standup’s debut show usually tells us who they are, then with their follow-up, they branch out.

Kemah Bob has done things the other way around.

After 2024’s Miss Fortunate , a wild shaggy dog story about a disastrous trip to Thailand, she now delivers that delayed “this is me” set, an open-hearted inquiry into how she got here and her origins as the child of a poor black family, the descendants of slavery, in the southern US.

That inquiry is prompted by misgivings on Bob’s part, coolly laid out here, about her career in comedy – which she loves, but worries is infantilising, and (see the receipts from that successful last fringe run) financially precarious.

Is she leading a grownup life – or should she start doing so? There’s a thinking-aloud authenticity to that exploration that is very endearing in Love Child.

Her audience cheerfully used as a sounding board, she casts her gaze back across generations of Bobs, and her own journey to the UK, to work out what life she ought now to lead.

At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh , until 30 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews Continue reading...