‘What colour am I?” Sophie Duker asks a white audience member – and it’s a neat way to launch into her show, exploring how black (her category, not her colour) bodies are perceived. Duker is a fast-rising, former Funny Women finalist who runs the Wacky Racists club night, and her full fringe debut is adroitly pitched somewhere between autobiographical calling-card and show with a big-hitting theme. We meet the pansexual comic with daddy issues and a lack of brown-skinned role models. And we learn how black people are used as props in white narratives – not least, the 19th-century freakshow celebrity and so-called “Hottentot Venus”, Sara Baartman, who gives the show its title.
Duker doesn’t spell it out – the show’s thesis could use a bit of tightening up – but by the end of Venus, we’re left with the impression that Meghan Markle, the porn star Skin Diamond and all those black babies modelled by “white saviour” celebrities are Baartman’s inheritors, struggling to tell their own stories and not be an exotic bit part in others’.
Before we get there, though, the show feels more like a whistlestop tour of some things that concern Duker – a mishmash of reflections on her sexuality, her education and (via a droll routine about an Uber driver) her absent father. There’s lots of joshing of that unfashionable tribe, white men – punches I was happy to roll with until Duker called Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg “archetypal white guys”, which taught me what a racial slur must feel like.
It all adds up to a confident and likable hour. The jokes aren’t particularly distinctive. Some are familiar, like her routine about west African “aunties”. Some – the one about Wills’n’Kate being more beige than fish’n’chips, or an underwritten one about James Bond and tokenistic woke-isms – are weak. The audio-visuals at the end – on interracial relationships in film, and on black babies as set dressing in Tinder photos – are expertly engineered for aghast laughter. Finally, it’s an eye-catching debut, from a companionable and charismatic host who makes the integration of personal and political seem effortless.
At the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
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This review was amended on 5 August 2019 to correct the description of a joke. An earlier version incorrectly referred to one of Duker’s jokes as a routine about West Indian “aunties” when west African was meant.
