DeAnne Smith: The Best DeAnne Smith DeAnne Smith Can Be

Long-form standup sets are fairly common on the Canadian circuit—after a 15-hour drive a 20-minute spot just isn’t enough—and another well-honed act has now ascended from that fertile, maple-fuelled conveyor belt.

In her poster DeAnne Smith looks like an elfin Anne Robinson and that isn’t wildly off beam. She kicks off with a sweet, self-effacing ukulele ditty but goes on to reveal a sinister edge and a compulsion to talk about pretty much anything, however much discomfort it may cause.

The Montreal-based comic was nominated for the Melbourne Comedy Festival’s Barry Award earlier this year and Edinburgh clearly holds no fears. She’s able to make even the tamest punchline fly with a clever vocal flourish, induces roars during her songs and happily gives a great chunk of her show over to the audience.

Smith forms an unusually firm bond with her visitors, affording us relationship-level status for an hour but also vowing to do a proper break-up when it’s finished. In between she takes her new partners on quite a trip, switching rapidly from likably smart to loudly extreme and treading a wafer-thin line between the knowingly satirical and the genuinely offensive. One three-pronged gag about African adoption causes particular turmoil. “Is that joke racist?” she enquires, sweetly, as if the thought had never before occurred to her.

Ingeniously disingenuous, Smith toys with her paying public like a housecat torments a newly captured mouse. And yet—let’s labour that analogy—they lap it all up. A fearsome talent.