Parenting teens in times of genocide doesn’t sound like a very funny topic for a stand-up show. But a good comedian can render any source material hilarious, and works with whatever life throws at them. And Esther Manito is a great comedian.
Like some kind of twisted lovechild of Rik Mayall and Leila Khaled, she channels a delightfully manic energy into a fiery and passionate response to life’s quotidian disappointments. And like all great art, what really makes her soar are the extended diatribes spitting out glorious nuggets of precisely-aimed venom.
To be fair, these are used quite sparingly, with plenty of immersive scene-setting in the build-ups. Manito is a master storyteller, hilariously relaying the awkward misunderstandings, exasperating dialogues and petty (and not-so-petty) iniquities of daily life.
Existing fans of Manito’s shows will already be familiar with her parenting woes, which are entering a new phase as her kids reach teenhood. Of course, this opens up a whole range of rich comedy seams to mine - drugs, puberty, generational differences ... and having her feminist principles challenged by her irrepressible urge to comment on her daughter’s PMT (“If anyone had for a second implied that my mood swings were down to my period, I’d burn London to the ground; now I’m bonding with my husband over becoming a toxic man”).
Her poor family get a battering, as usual - part of Manito’s appeal is to parents seeking to vicariously live out their repressed anger at their nearest and dearest (“After fifteen years of family life, I have concluded we’d all just be better off as friends - if we could just communicate through a family WhatsApp group which I could mute, that would be perfect”) - but underlying it is a clear, if heavily-disguised, affection for her endlessly frustrating brood.
Mentions of Palestine and Lebanon are very sparing given the circumstances; but as the show progresses, it is clear that the, already high, baseline anxiety of Manito’s character has been very definitely upped a notch by the war raging in her father’s homelands; whilst her daughter's insistence that she give her London Marathon sponsorship money to sloths gives rise to some serious eyebrow-raising amongst her extended family...
Whilst the show is tightly-structured and scripted, Manito has also mastered that invaluable weapon in the armoury of the stand-up comic - the ability to improvise hilarious responses to the unexpected. As well as incorporating audience responses and attributes into her commentary, she also manages to turn a dodgy mic into an opportunity to simultaneously castigate both conspiracist paranoia and Starmer’s increasingly authoritarian turn.
In amongst it, the feminism is still there, but never in a preachy way. “I think it’s different for men, I do,” she tells us, noting that Zelensky’s image as a dignified and heroic war leader is apparently unimpeachable, despite the existence of a viral video of him playing the piano with his penis during his former life as a comedian. “I just feel if there was a video going round of Angela Merkl playing the french horn with her flaps, it might tarnish her somehow”.
Hysterically perceptive and riotously cathartic. Much recommended.