Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

People have a lot of opinions about what Sooz Kempner looks like. And ‘people’, of course, means ‘men’, who are not coy about taking to the internet to tell the comedian exactly what they think of her appearance. She often claps back online, even if feeding the trolls is usually discouraged, and now she’s built a show around it.

Regurgitating social media exchanges often seems like uninspired material for comedians, with a slightly smug air of ‘needless to say I had the last laugh’ about it. Kempner doesn’t entirely avoid that latter criticism, but letting the uninvited commentators be condemned by their own words, as she largely does, proves more effective than adding snarky comebacks.

She uses the comments as a basis for more general discussion about how women are defined by their looks. It comes as no surprise that one heroine is Barbra Streisand, who ignored a producer’s demands to have her nose fixed very early in her career and didn’t do too badly out of it.

Kempner isn’t overtly tub-thumping for empowerment but she is more gently suggesting looks just shouldn’t be such a massive issue. That extends to reply guys who try to be nice online, but come across as weird, and even to women themselves. To back that up, Kempner offers plenty of self-deprecating lines but with such irony and self-awareness, it never feels as if she’s lessening herself.

Widening the theme, she recalls a very weird audition she endured and takes a deep dive into make-up, with every cosmetic item designed to appeal to men’s baser urges. Doing this while she applies the make-up, however, slows the show and adds little.

Not that you need make-up now we have widespread image manipulation, and Kempner has great fun ‘Yassifying’ various photos, putting them through AI to make everyone look like a smooth-skinned, bushy-eyebrowed devotee of plastic surgery.

The hour also encompasses how the comic was inspired by Olivia Newton John's Xanadu, first heard on an album of female artists when she was seven years old, the difficulty of explaining Mr Blobby to anyone who didn’t grow up in the UK, and an appreciation of dressage, instilled in her by her mum.

These things are stitched together surprisingly well, with the very personable Kempner also engineering some plausible callbacks to further bind the show. Her upbeat, voluble delivery maintains the energy, while she has a secret weapon in the form of her formidable singing voice should proceedings require a further boost.  

The result is a chatty, friendly hour based around a valid social  point, even if it’s not quite as sharp as it could be.

Review date: 24 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Laughing Horse @ The Counting House