IT’S easy to caricature Jo Brand: sapphic, DM-wearing fat lady whose slash of red lipstick and line in cake jokes made her briefly huge, natch, in the Eighties. As alternative comedy moved on and Ben Elton put his sparkly suit in a bin bag, sent it to Oxfam and started writing novels, Brand seemed stuck, content with being a parody of her former self.
Meanwhile, female stand-up has gone from dismal to disappointing. There is no modern equivalent of the early professional edginess of Brand, Ruby Wax and Jenny Eclair. These days the female talent goes straight into television.
So what a surprise to see Brand’s return to Edinburgh stand-up, at the Assembly Rooms (she’s also performing her own play here, Mental, written with Helen Griffen). Although some of the material is business as usual, there is a freshness about her, much new writing, a real ease to her improv and a (dare I say it?) gentleness that wasn’t there before. She’s ditched the DMs and her hair is styled and coloured fetchingly.
She starts by telling us that she got married a few years ago and that she’s had two children, the younger now nine months, then goes on to discuss her makeover from the TV style gurus Trinny and Susannah, who told her never to wear black again.
“F*** those two posh old tarts,” says Brand, smiling naughtily. “I looked like Ann Widdecombe’s younger, not so attractive, sister.”
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There are a couple of old favourites that she sneaks in (the one about the burning of her bra having warmed up a whole village in Cumberland).
But mostly she finds fresh pegs for pet subjects. She and Ruby Wax dressed up as the hotpant-wearing pop duo, the Cheeky Girls, for Comic Relief recently. “I said to Ruby, ‘We are virtually menopausal, let’s do the leaky girls.’”
Like Brand, Bill Bailey, beloved for his appearances on Never Mind the Buzzcocks on BBC Two and Black Books on Channel 4, is the sort of comedian who doesn’t just have a fan base, he has a following. His stage persona is enormously likeable and he’s a massive talent and a skilled musician but this show at the Pleasance was plain lazy. Kids in the playground stopped telling Michael Bolton hair-gags back in 1996, but Bailey persists, making it his opener. And a satire of a Portishead song, while technically accomplished, was pointlessly late. Write some new material, Bill.
Assembly Rooms: 0131-226 2428 Pleasance: 0131-556 6550