Kate Butch: A Kate in the Hand is Worth Two in the Butch ★★★★★

Two years ago, The Recs declared Kate Butch the “Comedy Queen of the Fringe” after Wuthering Shites, her gloriously bonkers musical tribute to Kate Bush. Two years, one RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs the World appearance and a Celebrity Mastermind victory later, Butch is back in Edinburgh.

This time there are no Kate Bush songs to hide behind. No jukebox musical. No elaborate excuse for shoehorning Wow into a story about a Northern lass with an unusually unfortunate family history.

Instead, there is Kate Butch, a microphone, a handful of topiary and a mission to become a better person.

Or at least consider it.

A Kate in the Hand is Worth Two in the Butch is, on the surface, a stand-up show about proverbs. But we know not to judge a Butch by her cover. In reality, it is an excuse for our drag favourite to rummage through the cupboard of her life, pull out its shadiest moments and give them the full Yorkshire treatment.

The stage is almost absurdly simple. A few pieces of foliage spell out KATE, creating a sort of shrine to the woman herself. And really, that is all the production needs. Less is more. Butch walks on to a rapturous, affectionate response from the audience and immediately owns the room.

The material ricochets gleefully from the trivial to the personal. Language, Northernness, Duolingo, Park Runs as terrorist organisations, Celebrity Mastermind and Shrek, the Fringe’s obsession with finding its “Best Joke” and the truly vile behaviour of people who insist on playing music aloud in public all come under scrutiny.

And then there are the proverbs. They provide a (somewhat shoogly) hook on which to hang the show, with Butch gleefully testing their supposed wisdom against the messy reality of her own life. If these are the nuggets of advice we’ve inherited to help us become better people, she seems determined to find out whether any of them actually work.

It is Butch’s self-proclaimed pettiness that makes the show particularly delicious.

Butch is not merely capable of holding a grudge. She appears to approach resentment as a long-term investment strategy. There is a meaty section of the show where revenge is plotted with the precision of a military campaign, and real-life social media trolls are dispatched with the sort of surgical efficiency that makes you almost wish they would send another message. Well, almost.

For while there is plenty of celebrity name-checking (“Never meet your idols” is followed with quite the burn), A Kate in the Hand is at its best when Butch turns the spotlight firmly on herself. Stories about growing up, coming out, and the cruelties of childhood gradually reveal the person beneath the punchlines. Her experiences of homophobia, both in person and online, provide some of the show’s darker, deeper material.

She has that rare ability to make something genuinely uncomfortable funny without pretending it isn’t uncomfortable. A painful memory can become a punchline, which becomes a moment of recognition, which becomes another punchline. The laughter does not diminish what happened. It feels more like taking ownership of both the hurt and the coping mechanisms.

This is where the distance between the Butch of Wuthering Shites and the Butch of today becomes most apparent. The previous show demonstrated that she could fill an hour. This one demonstrates that she does not need songs, spectacle or a familiar cultural icon to do it. She simply needs an audience in front of her. She has emerged as a performer who seems completely at home in her own skin, even while spending an hour cheerfully cataloguing everything about herself she would quite like to change. It seems ironic – from our perspective, she doesn’t need to change very much at all.

Wuthering Shites made Kate Butch a Fringe favourite. A Kate in the Hand is Worth Two in the Butch makes a rather stronger case for something bigger. Beneath the sequins, self-deprecation, silly jokes, and magnificently petty observations, there is an undeniably skilled stand-up comedian.

You know what they say about lightning striking twice. Forget the proverb.

The Comedy Queen of the Fringe has returned!