It’s seven years since Michelle Wolf addressed the White House correspondents’ dinner, but she still gets a round of applause for merely mentioning it here. Few other comics are so associated with a single, one-off performance. That gig pitched the Pennsylvania native into a political firestorm – but in her recent live work, the comic (now based between London and Barcelona) is as apt to joke about her own life, and gender politics, as current affairs. And tonight, there are pressing personal, and very gender-related, concerns to address: Wolf appears onstage eight months’ pregnant.
As you’d imagine, there’s plenty of material about that experience, including a riff on the cholestasis she developed in her first pregnancy, and another straining to justify (by characteristically blunt comparison) the “placenta smoothie” she consumed at the birth of her first child. But, understandably for an act who generates half an hour’s new standup every week for her podcast Thought Box, Wolf’s show doesn’t linger on any topic for too long, ranging across her life in a multiracial family, pigeon spies in the second world war, and the experience of being a conjoined twin.
It teeters on the edge of tastelessness, that last one, but a feature of Wolf’s comedy is an aversion to right-thinking, a preparedness to alienate in pursuit of the joke. See a gag comparing drag queens to Belgian colonists in the Congo, or another refusing to engage in baby talk for fear of what her burbling tot might actually be saying. That’s what gives the 40-year-old her edge: even generic routines (the one about women needing pockets, say) can swerve on to sensitive territory.
It’s not always a show where the thinking develops: Wolf’s routines, delivered with a mischievous perma-smile, can feel like gambits or provocations, thrown out to trigger a reaction or start a conversation – about how the village it takes to raise a child has been atomised, say, or about the limits of her, and her audience’s, liberalism. Together, they make for a smart and sly set in which the tongue that lashed Donald Trump is turned instead on gender politics, Wolf’s foibles, and our own.
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At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 17 August
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