Entertainment
Lara Ricote’s goofiness lets her get away with racy jokes: ‘How far will they let me go?’-Ashley Davies-Entertainment – Metro
‘People say I’m lovable and I want to play with that.’
Lara Ricote looks like butter wouldn’t melt (Picture: Steve Ullathorne)
Lara Ricote is the cutest Trojan horse in stand-up. Winner of the Best Newcomer prize at Dave’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards 2022, she gets away with some outrageously weird, open and (jokingly) mean stuff, thanks to having the demeanour of a goofy little teenager and being irresistibly funny and likeable.
Whether Lara is insulting her sister’s intelligence (her pronunciation of ‘stoopid’ in a mock New Yoik accent is delicious), outing her dad as an anti-vaxxer, recalling getting caught shoplifting cheese or going into sonic detail about why she needs to ditch her hearing aids to have sex, her act is a spicy blend of surprises from a unique talent.
Her new show is called GRL/LATNX/DEF because much of it is about her intersectional identity, and how she’s getting her head around being a minority who doesn’t present as such.
The child of Mexican and Venezuelan parents, she says she’s new to the idea that she’s a person of colour. She also has severe, degenerative hearing loss, and can hear bass sounds well, but not trebles. ‘It’s a mild disability, but you know the world isn’t made for you,’ she says.
‘Comedy helped me see it as something interesting and exciting rather than just annoying. It used to be more frustrating for me but now it’s more a case of, “Let me write down the thing I heard wrong. Maybe I can use that.”’
As for her racial identity, she says it became news to her four or five years ago that she’s a person of colour. ‘It’s an interesting one, especially for Latin American people, because class is so often linked to the colour of your skin,’ she says.
Lara won best newcomer at Dave’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2022 (Picture: Euan Cherry/Getty)
‘In Mexico, if you’re white you’re considered rich whether you’re rich or you’re not.
‘When you come to Europe, immediately the status you were awarded for no good reason is put into question and that’s a really interesting and weird thing. It’s like in your country you’re white, then you come here and you’re not.’
She enjoys playing with the idea of being in these minority groups. ‘It’s a fun reality I’ve had to live with,’ she says. ‘It gets me in to some places but also keeps me out of other places. I land in a weird, in-between space.’
Lara, who had originally wanted to work in micro finance, grew up in Miami and moved to Amsterdam to do a degree in political theory. Her sister loves doing improv, and when she came to visit Lara, the two of them found a show they could participate in.
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Lara was quickly hooked on the buzz of making people laugh. Her mother is a famous soap actor who had ‘forcefully’ made her daughters take acting classes, but this was the first time Lara had experienced the thrill of being silly with a bunch of other adults.
She soon set up a comedy night in Amsterdam – and later a Spanish-language night in Buenos Aires – before winning the 2021 Funny Women Stage Award and appearing on Comedy Central.
Lara is currently writing a series about herself and her sister for Fudge Park Productions, which was set up by the creators of The Inbetweeners. And, having seen lots of different boundary-pushing comedy shows in Edinburgh this August, she is keen to go further with the absurdity.
Lara is aiming to finish writing a comedy series based on her and her sister (Picture: Supplied)
‘A lot of what I’ve been writing recently is stupid impressions, and material that’s silly and a little bit gross,’ she laughs. ‘People say I’m lovable [she squirms a little saying this] and I want to play with that. How far will they let me go? In general, they let me go quite far with racy stuff because I seem naïve and innocent.
‘I have a character called Hot Baby, which I think is gross and weird,’ she adds.
If anyone can pull off something like that, it’s going to be Lara.
Lara’s GRL/LATNX/DEF is on from January 23 to February 4 at Soho Theatre, London, sohotheatre.com
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