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The Guardian

Jena Friedman: Motherf*cker review – political zingers and all-too-raw grief

Standup shows about losing a parent – 'dead dad shows', they get called – have become a genre unto themselves in recent times, and nowadays tend to arrive couched in self-awareness and alertness to cliche. No such irony attends Jena Friedman's show about (among other things) the death of her mother, which – three years on from that event – is palpably raw and vulnerable. The parallels Friedman draws between loss of a parent and the decline of American democracy are lucid. But elsewhere her material on bereavement feels insufficiently processed and too painful, frankly, dissipating the energy of the 42-year-old's big-hitting opening half. The jaundiced tone of Motherf*cker is established from the off, as Friedman enters the stage flag-waving in a Maga cap to the strains – and it is a strain – of patriotic country music. 'I look like a Republican's wife,' she says, before launching one satirical hand-grenade after another, about abortion in the US, how the Democrats should have run Kamala Harris's campaign, and how her unborn baby resembles Jeffrey Epstein. The in-your-face material is greeted variously with startled laughter, sometimes dazed silence ('you can't rape a foetus'), and nonplussedness – see one routine sharing the home addresses of Republican lawmakers, which might be more worthwhile for an American audience. All this is just buildup to the tale of Friedman's overlapping pregnancy and bereavement. She's anxious about becoming a parent, turning to her mother for support – only for mum to be given a cancer diagnosis and weeks to live. There's some meconium-black comedy on how these processes mirror one another (on her son's difficult birth: 'I didn't want to leave my mum either') and a could-be-fun closer about her mum intervening (or is she?) from beyond the grave. But their humour is undermined by Friedman's emphasis on how damaged she was, and still is, by her loss. There's some awkward crowdwork, too, which includes repeated apologies for the 'gross' venue and her miming, apropos of not much, the mass-shooting of her audience. Motherf*cker makes an impact, politically and personally, but not always a comic one. At Monkey Barrel at the Hive, Edinburgh, until 24 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews