Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If she was a shite feminist before, Rachel Galvo is more than making up for it now.

This is a show that gleefully torches society’s expectation that women are supposed to be demure. And if being funny has traditionally been prized as a male attribute with women expected to merely laugh sycophantically in the background, she’s parking her tanks on that lawn too, with a hefty supply of uproarious tales.

Many of these are at her own expense, including the hilarious, stand-out anecdote about trying to use a tampon for the first time having never been taught how by the nuns responsible for her sex ed. The gales of laughter this elicits also speaks to another routine contrasting the coy public giggle women are taught to have with the more hearty, visceral, guffaws they express when not in male company. The howls Galvo generates are definitely of that latter, let-loose variety.

Yes, self-deprecating humour may be more of a female trait than a male one, but Galvo weaponises it, owning her embarrassment and alchemising it into powerful comedy routines. 

It was not always thus. The comic was raised in a very traditional Irish Catholic school which prepared her only to be a stay-at-home mum dutifully serving her husband. She only realised how fucked-up this indoctrination had been when she was asked to do a drama school project interrogating her trauma, and therein lay its roots.

She mocks the church now, and while the angles aren’t entirely fresh, her no-nonsense attitude adds sparkle. There are murmurs of recognition from the crowd throughout – except perhaps at her winningly transgressive admission that she got horny at confession. 

Galvo also has lots to say on body image as the victim of relentless childhood bullying over her weight (and maybe her obsession with Jean Valjean from Les Mis, but that one’s on her).

Later, time studying finance among the putative City slicker types at Trinity College Dublin did nothing to improve her perception of men as shallow boors.

All this is delivered with fierce attitude, with Galvo thoroughly owning every triumph and failure in her life, candidly described. Her presence is electric and she’s utterly in command of the room and her exuberant material – all that drama-school training paid off.

Galvo is fiercely and rightly proud of the fact that she’s not going to be defined by male validation. But let me be one man humbly validating the fact she’s bloody good at comedy.  Shite Feminist is an absolute riot, especially so for the women it’s so squarely aimed at. 

Review date: 13 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Dome