Cool is a currency that should be spent in your teens and twenties. But some of us want to retain our stock of it well into middle age. That’s the premise behind – and the inherent humour in – Jo Prendergast’s show The Cool Mum.
Dr Jo Prendergast to give her proper title. The New Zealander is a psychiatrist and author IRL (does writing that make me cool or uncool? No, don’t answer. I know already).
She turned to stand-up in 2017 at the age of 48 and now she’s making her Edinburgh Fringe debut in her fifties with a show that is a parody of an online personal development seminar. By the end of said seminar, she tells her audience, they will all be what it says on her T-shirt: “Lit AF”.
Prendergast’s show – which comes in at a brisk and breezy 45 minutes – has drop-in videos and painless (I speak from experience) audience participation. But at its heart is Prendergast – playing a hopefully less knowing Prendergast than the real one – telling us what a cool mother she is whilst demonstrating the opposite. (Unless you think cyberstalking your teenagers is acceptable. And if you do this probably isn’t the seminar you need.)
It’s a slim conceit for a show and to a degree the performance is better than the material, but Prendergast is engaging, works well with the audience and has a few good lines that are in danger of not being appreciated as she rattles onto the next part of her “talk”.
It’s a show that may be best appreciated by parents, but she smartly weaves in material for everyone from boomer to Gen A (every day’s a learning day).
If anything, I’d like to have seen her lean more into the darkness of a mother unable to give her kids space, but that is not the vibe here. Rather, she’s inviting us to laugh at mums going on TikTok, speaking the latest lingo and trying to be down with their kids whilst parading just why her kids aren’t really talking to them any more.
Dr Jo Prendergast: The Cool Mum, Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Coorie), 13:00 until August 25 (except August 12)
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dr-jo-prendergast-the-cool-mum
Teddy Jamieson