Olga Koch: Fat Tom Cruise review – surefire standup pirouettes through the punchlines
The fast-talking comic considers fraternity culture, gender discrimination and an unrequited crush in a cleverly engineered show
From the outset, Olga Koch’s show Fat Tom Cruise looks like it’s got something meaningful to say. It’s not just the screens and sleek stage furniture, on to which details of several US legal cases are projected (alongside many a glib punchline, admittedly). It’s also our host’s swaggering authority: Koch powers through her show like a woman on a mission. So what’s its agenda, this new set that professes to tell a story that really isn’t Koch’s own? Well, to begin with, it’s that men’s self-esteem issues are laughable and that “teenage girls are more emotionally intelligent than any man”.
Hmm, I thought. Until, in due course, Koch is revealed to be engaging in a good old-fashioned bait-and-switch. But first, the story in question, which traces the young Koch’s journey from school senior, avenging herself on an unrequited crush, to college student in the US. Here, our host is drawn into fraternity culture – first at a hazing ritual in which she reluctantly participates, and later when buddying up at a wedding with a man (our eponymous hero, no less) nostalgic for his frat-boy past. Interspersed with this is a briefing on several real-world gender-equality lawsuits that alleged, and proved, unfair discrimination against men.
What, one wonders all the while, is Koch up to? Certainly, she’s up to stellar comedy: she performs with such drive and command, a no-nonsense approach to lots of nonsense, pirouetting across the stage to celebrate this or that zinging put-down. And with such well-honed wisecracks too! So imperious and fast-talking is her performance that when Koch once or twice forgets her lines, it’s as if Katharine Hepburn had got tongue-tied in Bringing Up Baby.
Her wider project, meanwhile, is revealed at the show’s end, as Fat Tom Cruise’s fate suggests male vulnerability may not, after all, be such a laughing matter. It’s a sentiment worth endorsing, even if I found this denouement a little earnest and (with respect to the earlier “let’s laugh at men” moments) crudely engineered. But there’s no doubt this remains another substantial set from one of the fringe’s most reliable purveyors of big-payload comedy.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh until 30 August