Jo Caulfield: Pretending to Care

Maybe it’s some curious side-effect of shelling out for an expensive new kitchen, but Jo Caulfield seems considerably more caustic this year. It could also be her recent move from middle-class Marchmont to the more, er, cosmopolitan, Leith. Plus a Brexit aftershock. The mildly furious comic gets that out of the way in a dismissive rant early on here, not wanting to “waste good jokes” on Cameron, Corbyn and co.

Either way, it’s a welcome surge along the profanity superhighway, and her faithful Radio 4-infused fanbase seem more than content with the added effing and jeffing. Although even the hardcore look slightly stunned when Caulfield suddenly launches into a bit of softcore: an elaborate and surprisingly professional lap-dancing routine. Well, it’s good to have something to fall back on.

The Midlands-raised, now Edinburgh-based comic is in fine form here, largely fuelled by a growing annoyance at fake niceness: that faux-friendliness that big corporations now force their employees to greet customers with. This is hardly hard-hitting social commentary but, offered some juicy subject matter, she rips it to shreds; the audience positively howls with laughter. Her poor husband gets it in the neck too, as ever, but all very affectionately.

The only slight misfire is the closing set-piece, about real-life rom-coms, which could—like most movies—be considerably shorter. That aside, Pretending to Care is a sharper, more cohesive experience than previous Edinburgh hours, which sometimes felt rather best-of bitty as she shoehorned in stuff from her radio shows. That lap-dance exhibition definitely wasn’t written for the wireless.