Zoe Explains It All

In Newcastle tonight for Zoe Explains It All, a two-woman show riffing on education, employment, and interpersonal relationships. Zoe is very clear from the start that she's not going to explain it all, because that would take too much time.

Zoe—just Zoe—is a character portrayed by a comedian whose real name I cannot seem to find on the Internet. It's a characters she's portrayed for, appearently, 13 years—and in such time she's had the opportunity to flesh Zoe out into a real enough person that you're not sure, at first blush, whether the whole thing is real or not. This lays the groundwork for taking the audience on wacky bits just beyond the pale of belief.

Bits aside, the character is internally consistent but unpredictable, which makes for compelling Riff Comedy. She's quick and clever, naïve but confident and charming, wrapped in a dog-print fleece and dog-print leggings that don't feel like a gimmick. She has a sort of extremely opinionated worldview that encourages tangents and invites you in on the joke. It's almost as if she's portraying a pastiche of a certain self-interested gammonish type of person—but she plays it with such infectious authenticity that you come around to her side whether you want to or not.

She's hosting a quiz next week and we've already signed up.