‘My family were horrified’: comedian Sophie Zucker on her hilarious cousin-kissing funeral musical | Edinburgh festival 2023

In the musical fringe comedy Sophie Sucks Face, an attention-seeking young woman hooks up with her cousin at her grandfather’s funeral. It is hilarious, laden with catchy tunes – and surprisingly relatable.

“I thought I was gonna be a musician for a long time,” says its creator, Sophie Zucker. “Then I got into comedy and I was like: I might like this more.” One of her songs, It’s About Me – followed by the refrain “not him”, meaning her grandfather – captures that overwhelming need at family events to show everyone you have grown up and made something of yourself. “At the same time,” Zucker says, those occasions “can make you feel infantilised and do some crazy thing”.

Yoni Got Hot, meanwhile, is about the cousin she breathlessly fancies, to the point that only copping off with him will satisfy her need for validation. It’s this example of how a sudden crush can squash all judgment that seems to have resonated with audiences the most. “People, mostly women, have told me about having a debilitating crush that makes you act really not like you,” she says. It’s Not Cheating (If It’s Just Gross) reminds us that Sophie has a fiance but not even this can stop her dressing up like an indie gimp in an attempt to lure Yoni in.

Clearly, this is autofiction. Zucker didn’t really suck her cousin’s face (and the rest), although she does have a fiance, and when fictional Sophie says to her relatives that, yes, they did see her on TV, this could also be true. In 2021 she appeared as Abby in the Apple TV+ series Dickinson, on which she was also a writer. They might also have caught her turn as a girl in the Gaslight club in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel or spotted her name in the writing credits on The Daily Show, on which she started in January as the youngest staff writer, at 29.

Like her alter ego, Zucker loves being the centre of attention: “Sometimes I’ll talk to other artists or read other artists’ profiles where they say, ‘It’s really just about my work.’ And I’m like: ‘Dude, we’re all in this because on some level, we really want it – of course I love my craft, but I’m just very comfortable being the centre of attention, for good and for bad.’” Although she does admit that at one performance, after gyrating in pleather with “my ass fully out”, she had family in the audience “and I could tell they were kind of horrified”.

You’re like: OK, I have to make a joke, it’s 9.30am, it should be funny and coherent, and it’s in front of my idol

As the show has grown, Zucker has been compared to the great Jewish American comics Barbra Streisand, Elaine May and Gilda Radner. “I love all those women,” she says. “What I love about their performances is that they’re not afraid to go goofy or ugly to get the joke. It felt like such a thing at that time, like a true character actor.”

While she’s been part of the New York comedy scene since leaving university, she says: “I don’t really do stand up. I do characters or other stuff.” She performs regularly at the Brooklyn Comedy Collective, at her monthly variety show Ladies Who Ranch, “where we do improv and sketches and host an open mic”.

After Edinburgh, Zucker is hoping the writer’s strike will be resolved so she can get back to The Daily Show. Since Trevor Noah left in 2022, it has been fronted by a rotating cast of celebrity hosts. “I’ve gotten to work with some of my favourite comics of all time, like Sarah Silverman,” she says. “We meet in the morning with the host and the entire writing staff and riff on the news stories of the day, which has been the most nerve-racking part because you’re like: OK, I have to make a joke, it’s 9.30am, it should be funny and coherent, and it’s in front of my idol. So let’s hope it goes over well.”

If one of your ideas is picked for a “chat” between the host and one of the comedy correspondents, then you work on it for the rest of the day. If not, she says, “then you do the regular role of writing maybe 50 one-line jokes about the headlines of the day. You write those in groups, so that’s a little less intimidating, especially when I was first starting out.” After the rehearsal, there will be rewrites, the show gets filmed at 6.30pm and you do it all over again the next day.

Not that any of this will curtail the continued rise of Sophie Sucks Face. “We already have our big return show planned in October,” says Zucker. After that she’s hoping to tour major US cities or get a theatre run in New York. And all the while, she’s tweaking the screenplay. The show certainly has sufficient heart for a film version. Zucker’s creative writing degree no doubt helped. “I like an arc,” she says. “I like a real moment of catharsis.”

The film, of course, would ideally involve a full cast of actors rather than “a really weird indie version where I play everybody in bad prosthetics”.