For Cotilda Inapo, growing up has apparently been one long lesson in survival, and on Friday night at the National Theatre, she turned those lessons into comedy.
Known in Uganda’s comedy circles as the queen of comedy, Inapo hosted her second comedy special of the year, Let Me Cook, a performance that felt less like a collection of unrelated jokes and more like an extended conversation about becoming an adult, becoming a mother and learning to navigate life when money, relationships and common sense do not always cooperate.
The title was fitting. Inapo was cooking, but her ingredients were largely drawn from her own experiences.
Her chatty delivery remains one of her strongest tools. Rather than relying heavily on elaborate punchlines, she builds stories, allowing the audience to follow her through increasingly absurd situations before landing the joke. The result is comedy that often begins in the ordinary and ends somewhere completely unexpected.
One of the evening’s strongest routines centred on fine dining and the disappointment of paying a lot of money for very little food. Inapo contrasted the abundance associated with ordinary Ugandan eating with the carefully curated experience of fine dining, where everything from the hostess to the scented candles seems designed to prepare diners for the small portion that eventually arrives.
But the joke soon became something bigger. Her frustration with expensive restaurants segued into a story about conferences, leftover food and her determination not to let perfectly good samosas, sausage rolls and croissants go to waste.
That story became a comic meditation on poverty, and how experiences from childhood can remain with you even when circumstances change.
“You can try to be modern, eh? But poverty doesn’t warn you when it’s going to follow you,” she joked, turning an uncomfortable reality into one of the show’s most memorable observations.
The same theme returned repeatedly.
As a single mother, Inapo mined motherhood for material, recounting the advice she received about raising her son, from sending him to boarding school to finding him a male figure. Her attempts to follow that advice only created more stories, including the discovery that her son and grandmother had developed a relationship that left her questioning who was actually raising whom.
The material was funny because it was recognisable. Inapo takes the everyday pressures placed on women and mothers and exaggerates them without losing their emotional core.
That storytelling approach defined Let Me Cook.
Even her recollections of learning to ride a bicycle as a child became a story about the difference between “beginner friendly” and the African interpretation of beginner friendly, complete with a large Roadmaster bicycle, instructions shouted by siblings and an inevitable collision with a neighbour’s property.
Towards the end, Inapo returned to her experiences of moving into a more affluent neighbourhood, using the price of a tomato to explore the invisible differences between Kampala’s neighbourhoods. What begins as a joke about expensive groceries develops into an observation about security, community and the economics of where people live.
Inapo’s comedy is increasingly about documenting the contradictions of adulthood: wanting to look successful while remembering what it means to struggle; trying to raise a child while still figuring yourself out; wanting to fit into new spaces while carrying the habits and instincts formed in old ones.
She does not present herself as someone who has figured life out. Instead, she makes the uncertainty itself the joke.
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