Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

If there was an award for most distinctive appearance, Maya Ricote would be a shoo-in. Her literally pneumatic tits and ass – created with enough balloons to lift an old man’s house – are accessorised with a huge wig, thick glossy lipstick and long nails (made of cut-up Post-It notes) in a grotesque parody of supposed hyperfemininity.

‘Look at my body,’ she purrs in her opening song as a nonagenarian in the artificially enhanced cellulite-free body of a 25-year-old, with nipples so prominent they must be a health and safety issue. The track comes with a raunchy Latin dance, with our clown apparently forgetting all the rousing flourishes of the music that require dramatic moves.

She’s set on being a star, and her agent has set her up with an audition in swanky uptown… all she has to do is act as over-the-top as possible and cry on cue. She’s trained for this – as proven by (overlong) footage of the real Ricote’s alternative career as a telenovela star, amusingly subtitled into very colloquial English. So why does she find it so hard?

This triggers a small crisis of confidence – ‘maybe I could be ordinary, blend into the crowd?’, another well-performed song asks – before the hour hurtles to a chaotic showdown between our melodramatic heroine, her agent and a besotted cabbie called Tony she picked up en route.

In the pandemonium, Ricote hilariously struggles to juggle the props that indicate who she is, one of several instances where she lets her mask slip, cracking herself up a little, to let the audience know she realises all this is preposterous. 

That’s all there really is of the narrative, and although it’s thin, it’s all the Mexican-Venezuelan-American clown needs to get between the set pieces that showcase her outlandish physical comedy skills. Ricote, the sister of fellow comedian Lara, clearly relishes the excesses the cartoonish alter-ego demands while getting extra laughs from the smaller, more precise gestures that reveal more about the character. Her obvious delight at performing this ridiculous alter-ego is infectious.

Review date: 15 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard