What do you do when you are struggling to find the perfect two-piece skirt suit? And how does being a trans woman up the stakes? Sam Nicoresti has a few things to say about her unusual challenges in this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award-winning show. But, crucially, mostly funny things. So the joy of Nicoresti’s second Fringe show — which also touches on autism, a breakdown and PTSD — is the way everything comes wrapped in self-deprecation rather than pure defiance.

This is a self-aware, artfully snarky stand-up comedy show. It will wrap you into Nicoresti’s experience — sometimes joyous, sometimes awkward, with lines such as “I feel like I suck at being a woman” — but almost always making you laugh.

Nicoresti makes us feel the frustrations of feeling like a phoney or being treated like a phoney, but she understands the preconceptions too: hence the excellent dirty gags that play with people’s fears of what a trans woman wants to do in a women’s changing room. Nicoresti wonders if being “trans” is a journey or a destination and has fun with her Lord of the Rings obsession; her relationship with her “green-haired girlfriend”.

The moment the mood turns earnest, Nicoresti upends it with a joke. She has the sort of front-foot energy and gag rate that can take knotty material into the mainstream. Take this: “Talking on stage about your mental health is like complaining about the legroom on the OceanGate submersible.”
And yet she will segue from talking about cats and dogs to a characteristically vivid story about going to donate sperm ahead of going on hormones — last-chance saloon to freeze that sperm — before deciding to spend the money on a holiday instead. Hence the show’s title, Baby Doomer. The ending is touching, but the hour as a whole is a caustic celebration of the absurdity and necessity of trying to be true to who you are.

Elsewhere in the awards: Ayoade Bamgboye won best newcomer for a show, Swings and Roundabouts, that artfully flashes back from a trip to the Co-op to her Lagos childhood and beyond. She’s a huge talent: a distinctive writer and a quietly charismatic stage presence, but I found the knowing eking out of her material as frustrating as it was amusing. Finally, the Victoria Wood prize for the “spirit of the Fringe” went to the long-running Comedy Club 4 Kids.
★★★★☆
Sam Nicoresti, Soho Theatre, London, Sep 4-6, sohotheatre.com

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