Kemah Bob's sophomore show, Love Child, is a superbly playful origin story that inverts the usual standup trajectory. After 2024's Miss Fortunate, a wild shaggy dog story about a disastrous trip to Thailand, she now delivers a delayed "this is me" set, an open-hearted inquiry into how she got here and her origins as the child of a poor black family, the descendants of slavery, in the southern US.
A thinking-aloud inquiry
That inquiry is prompted by misgivings on Bob's part, coolly laid out here, about her career in comedy – which she loves, but worries is infantilising, and financially precarious. Is she leading a grownup life – or should she start doing so? There's a thinking-aloud authenticity to that exploration that is very endearing in Love Child. Her audience cheerfully used as a sounding board, she casts her gaze back across generations of Bobs, and her own journey to the UK, to work out what life she ought now to lead.
Playful and edgy material
Part of the pressure, she jokes, comes from being the product of the first pregnancy her parents didn't terminate. She measures her upbringing against the Adverse Childhood Experience test for early-life trauma and it doesn't sound too traumatic because Bob is such a smiling and playful host, packing icky jokes about inheriting "dick-sucking lips" from her dad or, as an adult, sharing sex toys with her mum.
A jolt back to the present
She goes on to ruminate on what made her parents who they were – there's a great joke about her father's having never been taught to be a man – and her grandad too, a promiscuous blues singer with an addictive personality just like Kemah's. When this chronology loops back to the present-day party at which Bob first sets her scene, it's a jolt. That framing device could use some buttressing but the material is strong, in a thoughtful, sprightly show. At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August.
