Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Alex Franklin is having a bit of an annus mirabilis this year with her killer Mothman musical and this excellent hour of stand-up running simultaneously. 

She made a few waves with her debut Gurl Code a couple of years back, and now jumps to the top tier with this sunny, daffy riposte to the furrowed brows that often surround trans women in the media. Franklin is happy to say she has a lot of fun being trans: she’s comfortable in herself, young and beautiful, and hooking up with cool lesbians, aka ’crushing the forbidden puss’.

That level of joie de vivre is not available to everyone, but spending an hour in Franklin’s company is a good way to approximate it. She’s an absolute sunbeam from beginning to end, even during the few minutes that she devotes to transphobic comments made about her by trolls and deranged blogs. 

Even those segments are packed with jokes and reasons to be cheerful though, and when she can’t find the bright side she’ll just pivot dramatically, as in her first musical number, which aims to counter the country’s many ills with the news that beavers have been reintroduced to the UK. Her peppy songs, often reminiscent of Noel Coward, don’t take up much real estate in the show, which is just as well because they’d only slow down Franklin’s ferocious joke rate.

The ostensible raison d’etre of the show is that she loves kissing, leading to a climax with a very above-board and fully-cleared kiss with a member of the audience. She doesn’t pursue kissing and romance in a particularly horny way though – she’s more likely to show you her homemade CV explaining why she’d be a good person to date. (‘Queer, trans and Chinese – good for getting arts council funding!’) To extend the analogy of her friend who says her personality is ‘giving Beano,’ she pursues romance more like one of the Bash Street Kids after a plate of bangers and mash.

It feels like there’s a chance that a show like this might go missing in the increasingly deserted Underbelly Cowgate, which would be a shame, as it’s a proper feelgood smash. Even the transphobic bloggers had to admit they were charmed.

Review date: 23 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Tim Harding