MICF: Zoe Coombs Marr – Trigger Warning

Dave (Zoe Coombs Marr) just wants to tell jokes, but after his last show, he got a lot of hate from feminists on Twitter. So this time around he’s going to do something that can’t offend anyone – clowning.

Apart from running away from the PC police, Dave’s biggest problem is that when he decided to “find his clown” at the Gaulier Clown School in France, he discovered his clown was an angry lesbian in her 30s. He spends a lot of the show trying to avoid the crutch of stand-up. So he does mime; he discovers things in the space, and he interacts with the audience by staring at each and every one of us. It’s comedy for babies, he explains.

But the real genius of the show – or the genius inside the genius, the clown inside the clown inside the spinning-top-from-Inception, is Dave’s “angry lesbian” character, Zoe Coombs Marr. Trigger Warning is razor sharp satire, tackling the very thing that dominates the Comedy Festival landscape: male stand-up comedians.

Dave is an awful guy whose vulnerability makes him relatable, explains Zoe. And then Dave shakes her off and does what he can to rescue the show from a discussion of intersectional feminism – by pulling his dick out.