Review: Michelle Wolf (Work in Progress), Fringe 2025

Michelle Wolf returns to Edinburgh for the first time since 2016 with a set that weaves together the deeply personal and the political, shot through with her characteristic boundary-pushing humour. The Pennsylvania native moves swiftly between fury and absurdity, often in the space of a single punchline.

The cost of creation

Rage is fuel for plenty of comics, but in Wolf’s particular brand of precise and hilarious, she uncovers reasons to get mad (and laugh) at things you’d never even thought about. These days, the target is often men, and rightly so. The stakes feel higher. Eight months pregnant with a toddler at home, Wolf is newly attuned to just how unfair the world is for the people who literally make all the people. 

Indeed, as she points out, even in nature, the male lions aren’t the ones pushing their weight. But she makes it clear, it’s not that men are the villains. She muses they might just be trying to calm themselves in a society that still doesn’t give them that outlet. Still, it’s women who end up holding the bag.

Naturally, at this stage in her life, pregnancy and motherhood material is prevalent in the set. She tests the audience with a story about drinking a “placenta smoothie” after her first child. The reaction it provokes only underlines her point: society is still uneasy with the realities of being a mother, even though they’ve existed all along.

From there she riffs on the indignities of breastfeeding, the absurdity of so-called “mom hacks”, the ongoing problem of women’s clothing without pockets, and a pun on how quickly her daughter was born. Mothers will recognise much of this immediately, yet the craft of the jokes ensures they land well beyond that demographic.

A new rhythm

Since relocating to Barcelona and tending to her family, the 40-year-old comic hasn’t been out at comedy clubs as often as she once was. Instead, she has leaned into a different rhythm, building half an hour of new stand-up each week for her podcast Thought Box, often recorded live.

That process shapes this Edinburgh set, which feels like a mixtape of maternal material, political swipes, and odd takes, all pieced together with an I-don’t-even-care-if-it-lands confidence.

Taking apart the boys’ club of politics

Indeed, Wolf had plenty of other topics to cover. And yes, the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner may have made her famous, but her career has always stretched far beyond that. Still, she returns to dismantling bro culture at the White House, explaining why Trump was never an alpha male.

Later in the set she addresses internet rumours, including her alleged marriage to a woman, along with questioning men who poop naked, tales of women spies in World War II, her place in a multiracial family, and even an edgier bit with reflections on conjoined twins.

Overall

Wolf has said many times, including on her podcast, that you can joke about anything as long as it is a well-crafted gag. She is the living proof of that.

The hour flows in a looser way by design, and it plays like a mix of threads and digressions that reflect where she is right now. She is still as meticulous as ever, always finding new angles to press her point of view.