The menopause, growing up in the eighties, choosing not to have kids, and why men ask women to carry things for them: these are just a few of the themes that Desiree Burch mines in her latest stand-up set. “We’re going to have a fucking good time!” Burch shouts as she powers onstage in sleeveless shirt and leggings and launches headfirst into a lake of surreal and intimate ideas. She is powerfully charismatic and largely delivers on her promise. This is Burch’s first stand-up show for six years, and it feels like she needs to talk fast to cover all that’s happened in the interim.
A regular on panel shows like Mock the Week and Would I Lie to You?, the Californian-born comedian moved from New York to London in 2014 to live with her boyfriend. The boyfriend features a few times: his bald head and hairy body, his kindness. Her relocation is referred to in one of Burch’s twinkling blink-and-you-miss-it similes. She mentions that 39% of her DNA comes from the UK and says, “I’ve come back like a salmon to not-spawn and die.” Earlier on, there’s a reference to “tits heading south for winter like British pensioners”.
The comedian’s light-hearted first section investigates generational differences. She tells the millennials that older generations are just jealous of “the stuff that we all wanted and that you just got, like” (in a mocking voice) “mental health and consent.” Growing up as part of Gen X, she continues, if you said you were depressed, your mum “gave you a packet of fags and a Smiths CD”.
Burch also welcomes the increased openness around women’s health: “Ten years ago, if you said menopause, the flowers would wilt and the shutters would slam…” A whole surprisingly funny section is devoted to vaginal dryness, complete with sound effects and even an argument between the comedian and her own reluctant vagina (“I’d prefer to read now”). She compares the sudden aridity of middle age with the parched grass of recent UK summers (“mother earth is going through menopause”). There are serious moments here, too, dealing with medical inequalities and suicidal ideation.
A segment about insomnia has lyrical lines like: “Sleep is the thread that weaves the fabric of our lives together”. There are echoes here of Macbeth’s desperate yearning for sleep that “knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.” Her younger self was an Olympic-level sleeper, says Burch, but now: “three hours and I pop up like burnt toast”. Towards the end, she starts talking about “plant medicine”, supplied by her “shaman” (“and when I say shaman, I mean a white dude in his sixties with a ponytail”). The shaman was recommended by “a clown I fucked at Burning Man”. Funny and apparently true.
Not everyone loves this kind of comedy. While some of the audience give her a standing ovation at the end, others leave at the interval. If there’s a problem with the show, it’s perhaps that Burch is always at a similar pitch of manic high-energy narrative with few pauses for breath. If anything, she speeds up towards the end like the rocket in one of her own extended metaphors. A self-confessed Star Trek: Discovery fan, Burch uses the structural metamorphoses of orbital space travel to parallel the changes of midlife: “the thing that got you out here is not the same thing that’s going to bring you home.”
Sweary and warm-hearted, Burch swaps the caustic wit of many contemporary comedians for proto-crone wisdom and wide-ranging compassion. Her understanding encompasses each differently dysfunctional generation and, retrospectively, her own mother’s shortcomings. The full brilliance of this hour-and-a-half-or-so of jokes and amped-up autobiography glistens in its final call-backs and cathartic circular storytelling. From the well-worn stuff of perimenopausal life, Burch has created a joyful hymn to resilience.
Reviewed on 5 November 2025 and continues to tour until March 2026
