Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Tiff Stevenson has lured her audience here under false pretences, with a sultry poster and a title, Post-Coital, that suggests sexy times. But as she enters middle age and her 17-year relationship evolves from romance into warts-and-all codependence, being sensually alluring is the last thing on her mind. 

Indeed, ‘Is this sexy yet?’ becomes a catchphrase, but only ever growled intimidatingly at the audience as she overshares about farting, shitting and the hot sweaty flushes of perimenopause.

Commentators have called on female comedians to be less self-deprecating – the argument being that this is internalised misogyny reducing their own status – but it’s in Stevenson’s sarcastic British blood to be that way. ‘It’s funny to me,’ she says. And to us too.

The body positivity movement might have worthy aims, but it has become yet another way of policing women, she argues, having been slapped down online after making a self-effacing gag about her curves.

Nor is the constantly self-aware comedian averse to judging people on looks herself, admitting to shallowness in wanting a good-looking personal trainer at the gym.

Whether it’s fair or not, the young and the beautiful have privilege. Stevenson sees twenty-somethings believing they can ‘manifest’ things from the universe, blissfully unaware how doors are being opened for them.

Manifestation is a way of believing there is some agency in a random life, she asserts in another of the many strands running through this adeptly put-together hour. 

Stevenson herself has a guardian angel she found on TikTok while looking for psychic cleansing, acknowledging that it’s peculiar that an intelligent woman like herself turned to such woo-woo, but it came in a moment of vulnerability.

Having control of your life is playing on her mind as her father is suffering from dementia, so is denied that privilege. There’s humour in any bleak situation, and Stevenson does have a couple of funny anecdotes from this awfulness.

Across the show, witty turns of phrase, brash innuendoes and some of the weird rhetorical questions that enter her head after sex – the rare time the title becomes pertinent – add to the laughs.

Returning to her primary theme, she astutely notes that society’s move away from objectifying women has a strong class element. Progressives celebrate Formula One dropping its ‘grid girls’ from working-class backgrounds, yet mega-wealthy supermodels getting naked to flog designer accessories is seen as ‘empowering’.  It’s a topic close to her heart, as in her youth she was a grid girl, as it was a way for a young working-class woman like herself to earn some money and get a toehold in a  showbiz-adjacent world.

Some of this material is more point-based than joke-based – a feeling underlined by the fact her delivery style sometimes seems as if she’s pushing comedy at us rather than connecting over a conversation, however one-sided. But those points, and many more besides, are always salient, creating an informed and intelligent thesis.

Review date: 22 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)