Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Bella Hull's show is supremely well titled. With her flighty, sardonic attitude, she's fond of delivering unmerited advice and hyperbolic statements backed up by little in the way of apparent sincerity.

But unlike those mad, fever-dream adverts that cluster at the bottom of many internet pages, promising miracle fat burning cures or anti-wrinkle treatments developed by a retired pensioner, Bella Hull has definitive proof that doctors do hate her. Because she's been denied access to her medic ex's family Netflix account.

Following her break-up, it's time for her to reassess her identity. He was the steady, logical physician from a solid dynasty of the same, she was the feckless creative type that he was always chiding to get her chaotic life together.

Surveying dating apps like a battlefield and painting a damning portrait of her parents' failed marriage in pithy asides, Hull is bitingly cynical about relationships, seeking to drive a wedge between couples she finds in her audience. She has a type, she acknowledges, clever, pedantic, pale boys. But it's probably time to break the cycle.

Not that she's putting in the work of self-improvement. She pays lip service to the idea of getting fit and is too lazy to properly complete all her sentences, let alone commit to radical feminism. Although something of a cliché for single female stand-ups, Hull has succumbed to the lure of the mystical and astrological. But she's no recent convert, having been raised by a clairvoyant grandmother as a pre-teen after her parents split.

She's toyed with the idea of becoming a more commercial, observational comedian but is overcome by a moment of profound existential disturbance, regressing to a moment of clarity in her angsty childhood where she was temporarily free of her persecuting inner thoughts. Like many troubled writers before her, the ocean represented for her a dangerous siren call but also the freedom of self-expression.

Now living in a cramped high-rise flat in London, Hull shows some female emancipation in her slovenliness and a confrontational attitude towards household appliances, legacies of her mother's struggles against the patriarchy and the printer-like qualities of the woman that become a recurring metaphor in the show. Not to mention a deep inkwell of some of that droll observational humour Hull is supposedly grasping for.

More anxious, lonely and undersexed than her flatmate, whose casual flings she wilfully and egotistically misinterprets as reflecting on their relationship, Hull is capable of passion but only on behalf of a hypothetical child, with sleep coming to her only after she's watched the very worst of humanity online.

Through her arch, deflecting routines, Hull is nevertheless clear-sighted and piercingly funny about the stories we tell each other to sustain dysfunctional relationships. She opens up a little bit more about her own with her patently agile yet disloyal brain, disclosing the act that prompted her to cut ties with her ex.

She now actively resists the patronising conclusion that she's simply kooky and disorganised, when she’s perhaps not fully in possession of all the answers, but resists any straightforward clinical diagnosis.

Review date: 17 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)