‘Sir, are you aware those are women’s clothes?” Even the most basic interactions can be fraught when you’re transgender, and Sam Nicoresti builds their show around one such happening. Misgendered by a shop assistant, we find Sam in a department store changing room, squeezing into a dress from which they’re then unable to extricate themselves. How to escape this with some shred of dignity intact? It’s a big-hitting and farcical standup sketch, delivered with such self-deprecating joyfulness by Nicoresti that you almost forget the sensitivity of its subject matter.
That’s of a piece with the rest of Baby Doomer, a set that addresses with grace and buoyant humour our host’s wrestle with their gender and mental health. No tub-thumping here, just a high-joke-count hour from an act still learning how to be a woman (and quick to caricature how imperfectly they’re doing so) but cocky about their credentials as trans. It’s a step forward, and towards a more mainstream brand of standup, too, after Cancel Anti Wokeflake Snow Culture, the quirky multimedia offering that established Nicoresti three years ago.
The show takes that pressure-cooker changing room experience as a prompt to explore Nicoresti’s life in a Britain not always accommodating to a natal male walking down the street in a skirt suit. To whom might they look for a role model? Nicoresti proposes Sméagol/Gollum, greatly to the amusement of fellow nerds in the front row. Are they aunt Sam to their nephew, or uncle Sam? Should marriage be preferred to a polycule, or would it merely endorse the cis-normative status quo?
As if to emphasise Nicoresti’s repositioning as a standup who wouldn’t look out of place on Live at the Apollo, there’s a home-banker routine about having sperm frozen (mirroring Tim Key’s and Ian Smith’s set pieces elsewhere in town), and another about receiving a walking tour-style induction at the local gym – “as if I’m the king”, says Nicoresti, in a choice image. It’s quite the trick Nicoresti pulls off here, never soft-soaping the challenges of life as a trans woman while making of it an ebullient hour of comedy.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
