It would be no surprise, given the times, if disabled comedian of colour Lara Ricote winning last year’s Edinburgh fringe best newcomer award was greeted with cynicism in some quarters. What is surprising, when we meet over Zoom to discuss her extraordinary 2022, is that those who refuse to take the award at face value include Ricote herself. “I’m thinking all the time about why everything has gone so well for me in such a small amount of time,” she says. “I know I should just be grateful for it, but at the same time, it’s tokenism. I notice that – and there’s lots of funny in it.”
I’m talking to the Mexican-American comic, who is based in Amsterdam, between two stints at London’s Soho theatre with her award-winning set, GRL/LATNX/DEF. Far from resting on her laurels, she’s fretting about whether to stick with the show’s Edinburgh version, or fix its flaws – including a subplot about climate anxiety that she struggled to integrate. Of 30 performances on the fringe, the perfectionist Ricote reports: “I had seven that were really funny. Most of the other ones were OK, and some were really bad.” If Ricote’s career doesn’t have lift-off from this point forward, we cannot blame complacency. Mind you, few who saw her in Edinburgh think her career lift-off is in any doubt whatsoever.
The joy of the show – alongside Ricote’s popping personality and the quality of the jokes – was in its twin-track approach to identity politics. On the one hand, it did what convention requires of a standup debut, by focusing on her USP, on what makes her stand out from the crowd. On the other, Ricote’s account of her tripartite identity – deaf (she has degenerative hearing loss), Latina, and more girl than woman – constantly complicates those categories. She didn’t consider herself a person of colour until she moved to Europe. Her particular brand of deafness is “disability-lite” – and less defining a characteristic, she jokes, than her sister’s dimwittedness.
This makes for sparkling comedy onstage, where Ricote wriggles a finger or two into the fissures within identity politics, and starts tickling. It also pertains to that “cynicism” around her swift career elevation. “There are combinations of minorities that aren’t as fruitful for the comedy industry as mine,” she says today. “I’m disabled, but not so disabled you have to move things around for me to work. And I’m Latina, but I’m white-passing, and my English is good. So it’s just a little bit of Latina on top!” None of which undermines Ricote’s claims to those identities – but it does bring a nuance and honesty to her work that’s more compelling than many a lesser act caricaturing themselves for laughs.
Maybe it helps that she started out with no standup ambition whatsoever. Ricote grew up between Mexico and Miami in a bohemian household: her mum is an actor in Mexican telenovelas; her dad’s a photographer. In “a regular rebellion against life at home”, Ricote chose to study political theory at university. “My whole family was like, ‘You gotta go into showbiz!’ I was like, ‘I’m not going to go into showbiz, it’s stupid.’” Pause. “Turns out I’m now in showbiz.”
Blame her sister, an improv nut who visited Lara in Amsterdam and dragged her along to a class. Improv led quickly to comedy, for which Ricote discovered an aptitude – perhaps because “I’m very me in the way I am onstage. And I’m not threatening as a person. I don’t think people ever feel, ‘We’ve got to shut her down!’” Opportunities were rife in a city with a young and hungry standup scene. “The fourth time I did comedy, I got a 12-minute slot. That’s a long time to give someone who’s just started.” That was in November 2018. Give or take a lost pandemic year, by the time Ricote won the prestigious Funny Women award in 2021 (previous champs include Katherine Ryan and Desiree Burch), she’d been a standup for barely two years.
The award, she says, “opened doors I didn’t think were ever going to be opened.” Edinburgh success further confounded expectations. “This last year has gone insanely well. Every good thing that could have happened has happened.” Now, she’s scoping TV opportunities, and dreaming of taking her show to the US, ideally for “Latin American audiences and second-generation immigrants who understand what I’m talking about.” Beyond that, she’s hatching plans for a second standup set that will place climate change centre-stage.
“I’m hyper-aware of it,” she says – and it eclipses identity politics in importance. “It’s great that nowadays we want to hear stories from a wider range of people,” says Ricote. “But the ways in which we live keep harming the places where these people come from. It feels like there’s a big gap between us caring and us acting.” Can Ricote make us laugh at that? “It feels like we’re not doing enough – because we’re scared of not making it funny. And that’s weird. It makes no sense. All it does is separate our artform from reality.” With her first show, Lara Ricote let us know who she is. With her second, it sounds like we’re going to really see what she can do.
• GRL/LATNX/DEF is at Soho theatre, London, 23 January-4 February
