Jodie Sloan: Is She Hot? ★★★★

Jodie Sloan became an unwanted Tik Tok sensation when her image was plucked without permission and sent to millions of users with the caption “Is she hot?”. This unsettling experience provides the thrust for her one-woman show of the same name, which playfully unpicks the shallow, absurd markers by which attraction is judged.

Weaving together the comic and the confessional, Sloan is an amiable, quirky presence on stage — part self-deprecating Canadian outsider, part millennial diarist sharing old teenage notebooks, and part internet satirist holding warped online behaviour to account. Armed with a ukulele, she slips between jokes about Twilight fan art, awkward adolescent crushes, and the obsessive commentariat of TikTok, setting a tone that is knowingly silly yet threaded with darker observations.

Much of the set mines Sloan’s experiences of online virality. Her viral “Is He Hot?” and “Is She Hot?” songs ushered in a barrage of misogynistic comments, which she both ridicules and critiques. It’s comedy as coping mechanism, but also as cultural commentary, underscoring the everyday hostility women face online.

In truth, while the frequent musical interludes are cute they do become a little samey, with some going on a tad too long. And some of the jokes land on the wrong side of infantile.

But what makes Is She Hot? stand out from a sea of millennial confessional comedy is its gear shift. A climatic emotional punch — unexpected, heartfelt, and delicately delivered — reframes all that came before. The jokes about online cruelty and surface-level judgments suddenly have a sharper edge, as Sloan evaluates those vicious online barbs when enduring a personal trauma. It’s an ending that lingers, giving the show a depth and resonance that goes far beyond the light silliness of its premise.

It’s unannounced, unflashy, and all the more powerful for that. The performer’s ability to take the audience with her into this territory, without losing them or wallowing, is genuinely impressive.

Sloan is witty, charismatic, and unafraid to be both goofy and vulnerable. Is She Hot? may sometimes meander through internet ephemera and tittersome dating jokes, but its closing notes elevate it to something genuinely moving.