It’s a tough crowd to play to but Lucy Cox wins them around easily with her charming repertoire of comedy songs and savage black humour during her show Attractive Audience Required.Touching on themes of modern dating, the internet and sociopaths, she manages to tie disparate threads together in a surprisingly funny manner, whilst singing some wonderfully witty songs about sexual dreams, the London Underground and bad boyfriends.
For female comedians, it seems almost par for the course that they dedicate some part of their show to an amusing anecdote about their love life, or emphasise just how strange some of their past catches have been. It’s a massive relief then that Cox’s material is as fresh and sharp as any on the Fringe and that she ventures outside of these constraints.
Refreshingly, she’s sharp enough to work on those subjects without referring to cliché or standard comic terrain and her songs are well-written and enjoyable tunes. With both catchy tracks and jagged observations, she occupies the same territory as Isy Suttie, though she currently lacks the edge of pathos or whimsy Suttie wields.
With all these advantages she deserves a bigger venue than she’s currently in and one can easily see her comfortably filling one. A smart, funny and charming gem of the Free Fringe with a devilish streak of dark humour.
