Desiree Burch is putting the finishing touches to her new Edinburgh fringe show. “This is the part where you’re like, ‘None of this matters. No one’s going to be changed after anything I’ve fucking done!’” Looks like I’ve caught her at a fretful moment. “But at the same time, I want it to mean something. Every time you make a show, in the back of your head you’re that artist thinking, ‘This is really going to make a difference…’ And it does, but just nowhere near the difference you want it to make.”
On stage and in person, LA-raised, London-based standup Desiree Burch is a voice you can’t not listen to. Having gone to the wrong cafe for our interview, she’s now blustered into the right one 20 minutes late. The show, she says, is “called Desiree’s Coming Early, which clearly I can’t do and never do”. It’s her first since 2017’s Unf*ckable, a smash hit performed on the top deck of a bus that recounted her experiences while working as a dominatrix in early 2000s Manhattan. Which would, in Burch’s telling, have been quite uproarious enough, even without the twist, which is that she was still a virgin at the time.
Building on her Funny Women award in 2015 and a growing reputation for outspoken, oversharing standup, Unf*ckable – a timely show in the year that #MeToo broke – was Burch’s breakthrough. But she was the last to realise it. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re having such a great fringe,’ whereas I was like: ‘I’m dying! I am so tired. I’ve done every extra gig I can possibly do, because this is the time to push. But I feel like I’m going to run right into the kerb.” A 2018 follow-up fell through when Burch had to return home to California for family reasons. But now she’s back – and with the spike in profile derived from Live at the Apollo slots, a Comedy Central special and regular appearances on Frankie Boyle’s terrific New World Order, perhaps she can approach Edinburgh with less anxiety this time around.
“I’m 40,” she says, “and it’s the first time I’m not mooching off a rich friend I went to school with, or living with three other people, or whatever. And I’m very happy about it, but I don’t know what to do with it, so I’m probably going to blow it.” Midlife is the theme of her new show, which is about mortality (“culturally we’re dealing with a mortality of sorts right now, so hopefully it can be useful”) and the loops we get stuck in. “I’m in the middle of life,” she explains. “I have enough of a history to go, not only have I done this before, but we’ve all done this before. Are we doing it because we don’t know what else to do? Is history a cycle, or is it this horrible infinite loop we get ourselves into because we never do anything differently when presented with the same stuff?
“And also it’s looking at myself and the patterns I framed an identity out of. And the self-sabotaging choices I make. And I talk about dating, having kids or not having kids, being at Burning Man and having lots of crazy things happen.” Like all of Burch’s solo work – the theatre shows she once made; the standup ones she makes now – it tells personal stories to make interpersonal (and political) connections. “I do feel that the more specific you get, the more an audience can go: ‘Oh, I’m not alone!’”
She’s had more success doing so in the UK than in the States, where she struggled as a theatre-maker for most of her 20s. Visiting Edinburgh then, she sensed a market for solo work that was funny and substantial, alongside – in the form of panel shows and radio comedy – more stable opportunities for aspiring comics. Americans, she says, undervalue funniness as a professional skill. “My friends in New York are trying to figure out yet more creative, innovative things to do there. And I’m like, ‘You would have been famous three times over by now in lots of other places, because there would have been value placed on what you do.’”
Burch always felt like an outsider in the US. “Growing up, I was always fat. We were the only black family in my neighbourhood. And all that was against the backdrop of Hollywood, where everyone just wants to be attractive and get some sort of Hollywood validation. For me, it was about surviving 18 years to get to some place where I thought life might happen to me.”
She has found it now, in the British entertainment industry, which has invited her to develop Unf*ckable for television. It’s a story she wants to return to and flesh out: “There’s a lot more important shit in it, and more to say about that time in my life and that time in the world.” But first, the Edinburgh fringe – that “weird pressure cooker”, she calls it – beckons. “I’m hoping to enjoy the festival while I’m actually doing it this time around,” she says, “while knowing that’s a distant dream. Fingers crossed it’s fun – but I typically dread it.”