Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Performing her sophomore Fringe show while heavily pregnant, Kate Cheka is reappraising her life… if not quite in the way you’d expect.

She’s proud of her time as a ‘good-time girl’ – as she calls herself in this show’s description – with plenty of frank, ribald anecdotes to share about her reckless and/or carefree experiences.

These tales, perfect for vicarious enjoyment, are mixed with astringent political jokes taking in colonialism, misogyny, the rise of the far-right and the rot at the heart of the police force, to name but a few.

Yet while her views are trenchant and her anecdotes fruity, she feigns innocence in their telling – giving a sly, butter-wouldn’t-melt upwards glance every time she says or does something inappropriate. Which is often. ‘Other comedians write jokes,’ she says. ‘I live life like a joke.’

And she seems happy to continue with a comparatively rootless existence. She cut her comedy teeth in Berlin – though mucked up the visa process to live permanently in Germany – and feels no particularly tight ties to the UK.

She can be unapologetically cynical – admitting to dating to get accommodation, for example – but is endearingly cheery with it, with a fierce sense of playful mischief running through the hour. Witness, on a simple level, how she takes relish in doing a terrible Irish accent.

The Last Funny Woman is an ambitious melding of the personal with the political, yet handled so deftly it appears effortless as the two strands intertwine. She wears her heart on her sleeve and her smarts very lightly, while living an unconventional, free-spirited life that provides plenty of fodder for her stand-up.

Though the British comedy scene should be grateful to have her, she feels, for many valid reasons, that it isn’t. She relates a particularly shitty experience with broadcasting executives to make that point.

Cheka is now starting to land bookings on Radio 4, which is progress. But while she wants to use the platform to make caustic jokes about the noxious political climate, the BBC just wants flippancy, finding no place for proper politics.

This line of thought leads her to a melancholic conclusion that’s all the more poignant given all the laughs she got from her cheerfully impish outlook over the 50 minutes. It’s genuinely sad that she feels that the system is so stacked against her – in no small part for being a working-class woman of colour – that the important things she has to say can never be commercially viable.

Review date: 17 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: PBH's Free Fringe @ Voodoo Rooms