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“When I get done with this, I don’t want to speak to a 12-year-old,” Desiree Burch says of her life as a stand-up comedian in her 40s. But that’s not her nightmare, where her dreams take her career to middle America, only to find herself booked mistakenly to do something else on a big gig for America’s biggest comedy stars. And that’s not even her real-life nightmare. For the past couple of years, she has had to deal with bum knees, on top of worries that her perimenopausal state might just be a precursor to dementia, and that host of problems that her mother has had to face before her. And the medical community is seemingly no help, as scientific research has ignored women (and women over 40) just as badly if not worse than show business does.
She makes it funny, tho! A decade spent in the UK has done nothing to dull her hard-edged, aggressively-paced NYC club style of stand-up. It as done much, on the other hand, to build a mighty multi-generational crowd for her on this side of the pond, thanks to her many TV appearances on panel shows, but most particularly her recurring role as the voice of Too Hot To Handle and her appearance competing a few seasons ago on Taskmaster.
The task Burch has set before her in this hour? A nostalgic defense of her generation (X) having to make their own way through childhood, dismay that her peers would even have kids with the world as it is, and empathy for those Gen Z kids for the struggles they’re facing growing up today.
She accomplishes her task with aplomb.
Desiree Burch: The Golden Wrath plays Monkey Barrel through Aug. 12, 2025.
