AAt a festival where everyone loses money and some can’t afford to come in the first place, how do you talk about your wealth and privilege? (Let alone encourage people to laugh about it?!) I’ve seen Fringe shows grapple with privilege in the past. Jack Whitehall, Ivo Graham, Will Smith (the co-writer of The Thick of It, not the slapstick-happy megastar): these acts have addressed their gentility but rarely looked beyond superficial class markers. And even then, they did so before the cost crisis of Fringe shows reached boiling point, as it has in recent years.
To pull that off today, you would need a lot of charm or a noticeable dose of moral seriousness. In his new show I deserve this (★★★★☆), Finlay Christie has one, and in her Olga Koch comes from money (★★★★☆), Koch has the other. I first encountered Christie at the Fringe two years ago, as one of the first stars to emerge from TikTok. He won the prestigious So You Think You’re Funny award at just 19 and amassed a huge online following by his early 20s – so there was always something gilded about his rise, even before he brought generational wealth into the mix.
In his new show, as in his first, that privilege feeds into Christie’s self-satisfied persona: a reflexive flippancy, as if taking anything seriously is vulgar. But he pulls it off because he combines it with light cultural commentary (about the things we have to do to acquire social capital these days), writes a mean joke, and demeans himself with grace.
I Deserve This doesn’t address privilege as directly as Koch’s show, but Christie’s wealth orientates him in a unique way to his subject: the things young people today have to say, do and claim to improve their social status. It gives him anthropological distance: he looks at the absurdity of it all from the impenetrable perspective of a man who has been spared his own struggles (“If I have Vietnam flashbacks, it’s from a nice holiday.”) And so the show tours trauma, neurodiversity and so on, illustrated with reference to our host’s life: the time he had sex with a man just to seem cool; the racism test he took in a mixed relationship; his penchant for UK grime, which is based on identifying with exactly half the lyrics of every song.
I thought the show’s combination of intelligence and pleasantly black-hearted wit was just right. Others might see the same old superficial humor, with Christie putting nothing on the line. (Not quite: as he admits, his speech about the bucket ends up ringing hollow, so the income is bound to suffer.) Olga Koch certainly works harder to break free of the channels in which haughty comedies about rich people usually play out. Her show questions the myths surrounding money and its possession. Is wealth ever earned? What moral dimension does it have? Is its distribution in any way rational?
All this is filtered through Koch’s life, which fortunately comes into contact with three different financial systems: that of collapsing Soviet Russia, where she grew up; then that of the US, where she worked; and now that of the UK. She speaks openly about her own privilege (“The thing about living on a yacht…”), but not The explicit: a number about being asked “How rich?”, while shamefully withholding concrete figures. This is only noticeable because shyness is not Koch’s usual style: in her role as the “bad bitch”, as she calls it, she is declamatory, always extravagantly on the attack, talking about her spoiled youth, her work as a young adult for “the video platform that radicalizes teenagers”, and her vacation on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. Just a joke? Our insecurity is part of the fun.
In one of her best jokes, Koch says that talking about wealth on stage is “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” It’s interesting that she briefly loses faith in the “bad bitch” character halfway through, stepping out of character to check that we’ve got the joke. Even Koch, whose project is about looking at money objectively and separating it from shame (or pride, for that matter), remains vulnerable to the disgust and discomfort that comes with addressing it publicly. Her show ends with her confronting the moral question of how her family fortune was acquired in the wealth-destroying frenzy of the collapse of the USSR, whether she should blame her parents for it—and with an update on her father’s relationship with Putin’s Russia. She also ends not with a speech about the loss of wealth, but with a fundraiser for the charity Arts Emergency, which campaigns for wider access to the arts. The examination of one’s own privileges has rarely been carried out so comprehensively – and in both shows it was also very entertaining.
