Sam Jay: We the Folks assessment – a cool prognosis of America’s ills | Edinburgh pageant 2025

In We the Folks, Sam Jay talks politics and tradition fairly than speaking about herself – and it’s an indication of the standup instances, maybe, that that feels transgressive. The present, nominated for an Edinburgh comedy award, takes the temperature of a divided America, and – even much less trendy, this – proposes the way it is likely to be healed.

It’s not an ideal set: Jay has a diffident method on the microphone, so there are punchlines that aren’t audible, far much less impactful. However the vary, ambition – and typically high quality – of her pondering makes one thing distinctive, definitely at this 12 months’s fringe, of this cool prognosis of America’s ills.

A marker of Jay’s intention to do issues in another way is put down early with a routine questioning “non-binary” as a gender class. Are we within the realms of Dave Chappelle-alike transphobic comedy? We’re not. However taking a look at her nation, Jay – herself black and homosexual – argues that the tempo of change is alienating potential sympathisers, that folks must step out of their silos and meet midway, that tradition wars are “individuals preventing for what they perceive”. She goes to a rodeo, and apprehends the gulf between red-state America and her world of veganism and trans bogs. She brings Jeffrey Dahmer in from the chilly. She interrogates black individuals’s culpability for the state of her nation. (“We celebrated OJ too onerous.”)

Typically, these are helpful in addition to humorous concepts. Typically, they’re arresting however glib – as along with her argument for a return to a state of nature, or the conceitedness v insecurity she identifies in colonialism v chattel slavery. However how thrilling to be, as that reference implies, at a present bandying large ideas round. And making them so provocatively humorous, as with Jay’s prolonged riff on “fucked farmers” and alien abduction, or her go to to the UK to come across whiteness at its zenith.

The pleasure, on the efficiency I noticed, was undermined by a bewilderingly abrupt ending. However We the Folks stays an attention-grabbing set from a comic book who’s discovered heaps to say, and much to snigger about, within the not-ostensibly-amusing situation of contemporary America.