Michelle Wolf ★★★★

Michelle Wolf made major headlines and enemies at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a gathering where she famously skewered Donald Trump with mischievous charm and surgical comedic precision. She hasn’t performed at the Fringe since 2016, making this 2025 return feel like an honorable homecoming, but this time she doesn’t take the stage alone: she is eight months pregnant with her second child. She jokes that this baby, like her first, will be a million times more interested in her than the father “because his nipples have nothing.”

Perhaps owing to the gig that vaulted her into the land of A-List comics, Wolf begins with the political. She sassily refers to all the Epstein scandals as a “sticky situation” before going broader: “I am angry with men. You know what you’ve done.” One group of men she’s particularly angry at: men who feel comfortable pooping naked. She’s also peeved with the patriarchy in general, questioning why in World War II even pigeons were considered for spy work before women.

Wolf jumps rapidly from one topic to another, the political veering quickly to the personal. She makes a passionate (and familiar) case for why women desperately need more pockets on their clothing. She also tests the limits of liberalism when she surprises herself after accidentally buying a gay children’s book in Barcelona, where she now lives part-time.

She admits that celebrity has its downside; she once Googled herself and discovered that she had allegedly pled guilty to bestiality. She laughs at that absurdity, as does the audience, though the laughter carries a tinge of anxiety about the horrors of misinformation befalling the world. Fortunately the world will continue to have Wolf around to give much-needed laughs and commentary, and hopefully she’ll finally snag those much-desired pockets along the way.