Is That a Burrito in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy You Have a Burrito?

In one of her routines, Lauren Bok mimes waking after a one-night-stand and not knowing who he is or where she is, and then dressing and escaping.  It’s not especially original, but she does it so well, it’s funny.  When she can’t find her knickers and her top, she turns to the audience for help.  A woman in the front row obligingly points to a plausible spot on the stage.  Ms Bok nods a hurried but grateful thanks, ‘finds’ knickers and top, then climbs out a ‘window’.  Her interaction with the audience throughout has a relaxed, natural quality as if, although we might have only just met, we’re mates already and on her side.  She has such an open, engaging personality you’d be mean indeed to dislike her.  During an anecdote, she orchestrates the audience’s ‘oohhs’ and ‘aahhs’ in response to each new development and is clearly delighted at the interactions – as are we.

These qualities, however, so valuable for a comedian (she thinks the distinction ‘comedienne’ is misogynist) with her self-reflexive schtick, don’t really make up for the fact that too much of this show misfires – too much a mix of sharp observation and physical humour with rambling chat or ‘ideas’ such as showing us pictures of movie actor crushes.  Rather a random assembly of hits and misses.  This comic clumsiness is a little surprising given that she refers to her years of experience at numerous gigs and festivals elsewhere. 

For instance, take the show’s title.  Mae West’s, ‘Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’ is sassy, a sexy double entendre.  Switch ‘burrito’ for ‘gun’ and what have you got?  On her flyer, she makes an extended metaphor out of the burrito (‘Life is a burrito…’), but that’s not in the show.  Instead, she dutifully warns us, with printed signs, that there are no actual burritos in the show.  Really?  She gives us also a kind of trigger warning, that the show will deal with sex, periods and the death of her father.  Do we object to any of that?   Of course we don’t.  On with the show.  Good, because ‘over-sharing’ is her thing - which she tells us over and over.  But why do female comedians so often fall back – graphically - on sex and periods?  It’s no longer ‘shocking’, so it better be funny or funnier than this.  Her punchlines are good, but the set-up for each can take so long you get restless.  When she does get to her father’s death, we might expect some more graphic bad taste, but there’s a distinct change of tone that throws up a contrasting but tiny pay-off: that even dead, Dad was still a prankster…

Ms Bok tells us at the end that she’s off to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival.  To succeed in that jostling, over-crowded and highly competitive event, Is That a Burrito will need both more and less.  More jokes, less meandering anecdotes that go nowhere.  More thought, less trusting to luck.  Maybe more collaboration with another writer and a director? 

Michael Brindley