Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

For Su Mi’s Fringe debut, the comic has settled on a unique visual presentation that mixes traditional clown tropes with elements that express something ineffable about growing up wanting to perform. 

Beginning their performance concealed behind a small velvet curtain, it takes a brave audience member to expose the living art that Mi has made of themself. You’ve probably seen pictures – there’s on on this page –but let’s just go down the list: checkerboard morphsuit, red leather boots and bustier, flaming fright wig, unsettling clown makeup and stained teeth. They look like a sort of goblin toy for children, from a line that was decommissioned for being too scary. It’s a triumph of DIY costuming equalled only by some of the other equally strange outfits that Mi dons throughout the show.

With visuals like these, perhaps it’s no surprise that the show struggles to live up to the lookbook. Part of Mi’s stated intention is to kick back both directly and obliquely against the cultural expectations surrounding their Malaysian heritage, and in this they are also successful. As they chant later in the show, Asian women are ‘supposed’ to be exotic, demure, classy, quiet. Mi’s character Thismotherphucker is the joyfully grotty and garish antithesis of these things, and you can feel how satisfying it must be to inhabit that character and use it to connect to their childlike joy of performing.

Where it fails to hit as hard is in the material. This is one of those shows that sounds funny when its concepts are described, but there’s a lack of comic rapport in the moment that frustrates its ambitions, even with a game crowd; many of Mi’s ideas here seem to lack the final twist that would get the big laugh. Dungarees covered in clown horns sound like they’d be fun for the audience to honk on, but the idea runs for five minutes without developing, quickly becoming boring and more than a little cacophonous. Even at its best, it’s fun rather than funny.

Throughout, Mi makes regular contact with the emotional underpinnings of the performance, usually via non-sequitur while, for example, performing a song about the 1990s while dressed up as a puppet with a sunflower head. 

Videos played during costume changes show them performing for the camera in their living room with their sister as a child, more exuberant and happy than the gruff, slightly anguished clown that they play on stage. 

Occasionally they throw out political points as well, like how 65 per cent of women hear the first critique of their body at age 9 or 10. It’s easy to see how these strands connect to (or are rejected by) the character Mi has created, and Thismotherphucker is clearly a respectable and effective channel for self-expression and self-actualisation, it’s just not often very funny.

Review date: 1 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate