With only two pop cultural reference points for Miami, decades apart but equally dubious – Miami Vice and when Kardashians have decided to “take” it – I’m a little curious as to the reality of this seemingly flashy destination.
“Oh it’s a horrifying place to grow up,” comedian Lara Ricote confirms without a moment’s hesitation, smiling as she let fly. To hear Ricote tell it, it seems everyone in this Florida city has an eating disorder, wears bikinis, is obsessed with body image and “you shave your legs when you come out of the fricking womb!”
As the daughter of a photographer father and an actor mother, famous in Latin America, Ricote grew up between Miami and Mexico City, as her mother’s work would often take the family there. “We’re all fine now,” she jokes.
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As part of the “middle child rebellion thing”, rather than follow her parents into the arts, Ricote did a u-turn and pursued politics, getting “really involved in the Bernie Sanders campaign…and I was doing Model United Nations and thought ‘this is my thing.’”
Having heard that it was “a very socially responsible place” Ricote then moved to the Netherlands to study political science and has been there for the past five years, that is, when not major winning comedy awards in the UK.
Ricote’s debut show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year won her the highly prestigious Best Newcomer award. Called GRL/LATNX/DEF, she’s bringing the show – which is billed as being about what it’s like to be Latin and severely hearing impaired, but ‘pass’ as white and abled to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival for her Australian premiere season.
“My hour is very much about identity politics, but it’s also sort of about tokenism. Like, we all want to hear me talk about something very clearly, these three things that you know I am, everybody came for these things, so I’m just gonna go ahead and talk about them like you want me to.”
“I think it comes more from that place of like, I know that right now minorities are ‘in’ and that’s cynical, so let’s talk about that,” she continues, saying that she feels there’s been a shift in the way the world considers identity politics.
“I feel like I’m on the end of the wave. We were like, ‘let’s hear these trauma stories’ and hear about everybody’s individual experience, and that was a wave, probably 2015-2016 to basically the pandemic. Then the pandemic hit and we were like, ‘we don’t want to hear about anyone’s individual experience’, we’re more about ‘let’s laugh about nothing’. At least it felt that way at the Edinburgh Fringe,” she observes.
So GRL/LATNX/DEF, she says, sits in between those two points. “It’s the post-trauma-hour thing before the comedy-about-nothing-thing.”
Ricote’s journey to comedy began in the Netherlands, at an improv night. “Oh, now this is my thing. This is so fun,” she says of her u-turn back to the arts. The 20-something Ricote has since performed on multiple continents, taught comedy theory and writing courses, run comedy nights, co-hosted a podcast and performs in both English and Spanish.
In a fairly meteoric rise, in 2021 Ricote won the Funny Women Stage Award, a major award in the UK, which generated plenty of buzz ahead of her debut season in Edinburgh last year. While she feels that the Funny Women award was tokenistic (“I’m probably the first Latin American woman to have gotten that and I think that people were vouching for me because of the combination of things that I offer”) the Edinburgh Fringe Best Newcomer win has been “wonderful” and life-changing.
“It’s been so exciting,” she says. “In the period from August to September my life changed radically. I got to have an agent in the UK, which meant all of a sudden I had access to jobs and I was able to live off comedy. It’s been really wonderful.”
The endorsement means she feels that she can be trusted with the work she creates, which has been liberating artistically. “It’s just given me a lot of freedom. Obviously a lot of fear, but a lot of freedom to feel like maybe now I can be a clown?” she laughs. Until she moves in that direction, you can catch Lara Ricote in stand-up mode in one of this festival’s most anticipated shows.
Lara Ricote performs at The Westin Three from March 30 to April 23 as part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Auslan sessions are available. Buy tickets here.