Lara Ricote: Little Tiny Wet Show (Baptism) Review by Esther
This is an incredibly trite opening sentence, but there is genuinely a line wrapping around the block for Lara Ricote’s Little Tiny Wet Show (Baptism). So much so, that we are constantly asked by passersby who we’re queuing for – and it’s at this point, we realise we each pronounce Lara’s surname differently. In 2022, Lara won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer with her debut show, so it’s understandable that she’s packing rooms so early on in her Fringe run.
Despite running around handing us out flyers (for her boyfriend’s show), the crowd still erupts when Lara finally takes the stage to Mika’s “Grace Kelly,” wearing a white baptism gown.
It is a very warm room, literally and figuratively; Lara encourages us to use the flyers as fans and the audience is in hysterics throughout, whether she’s telling a joke, pulling a face, or simply screeching. It is hard not to root for her with her impish voice and doe-eyed delivery. The way she wraps the mic wire around herself—as if it’s too big for her—only adds to her image of childlike innocence, which helps her get away with the premise of the show.
Lara tells us about how she is in her first adult relationship with an Argentinian who moved to the Netherlands to be with her, but she keeps leaving to go on tour. She makes parallels between her real-life union and the relationship between comic and audience. That’s essentially the show, with Lara’s trademark runaway train of thoughts sprinkled in—a personal favourite was referring to her childhood home as “trigger town”.
We miss some of the punchlines as she frequently moves the mic away from her mouth and even she acknowledges, “maybe once in your life: enunciate.” (It’s probably important to mention she is also hard of hearing.)
Having only ever seen clips of Lara online, watching Lara live didn’t feel like seeing the same comic who once said she planned to get rid of the cysts in her ovaries by getting pregnant, not eating so the baby would get so hungry, it would eat the cysts, and then aborting it. There are still plenty of silly moments—both cleverly written and totally absurd for silly’s sake—but some of Lara’s more off-the-wall outbursts definitely feel amiss in this new iteration of her comedy hour.
Lara Ricote: Tiny Little Wet Show (Baptism) runs until Aug. 25 at 16:15 at Monkey Barrel Comedy.
