Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

With a strong desire to be liked, Pernille Haaland is one of those comics who truly suffered when gigs shut down during the pandemic, not least as she was also forced to go and live with her parents and began undergoing therapy online.

So far, so quite familiar. Yet Haaland can lay claim to a certain amount of exotic distinctiveness because her family are Norwegian and now live in an isolated, rural part of that country, having decamped from London when they got tired of metropolitan life.

Haaland is, therefore, a classic insider-outsider in the UK, able to pass as a middle-class native who sounds like Daddy can afford to buy her a pony, yet too convincing as a Viking when an ex requested some sexual role play.

The question of where exactly her low self-esteem and ready self-deprecation comes from is moot. But Haaland positions herself pretty firmly below her sister and the favourite family cow in her parents' affections. Amusingly, she tends to take after her father; all her worst attributes are the ones her mother condemns but he takes avowed pride in having instilled.

The other significant person in her life is Cal, her Mexican therapist in California, a man whose curiosity she perpetually deflects, so averse is she to opening up. Beset by a 'resting confused face' and persecuted by knuckle-dragging US rock band Nickelback as the soundtrack to her mind, Haaland finds that deepest, darkest Scandinavia isn't far enough away for her to escape her problems.

Happily, what Cal doesn't always get, we, the audience, gradually do. And the instinctively blunt, sardonic comic starts to share: talking about her gynaecological specifics; her lack of maternal instincts; about giving up alcohol to stave off depression; her parents' determined quest to have her diagnosed with autism and some hilarious euphemisms for eating disorders. 

One hates to reach for the image of an ice queen thawing. But that's what it feels like, as having learned about sex from porn, Haaland is belatedly now in her thirties contemplating a worthwhile relationship.

With the pyrrhic victory of having moved out of her parents' home, it would be overstating it to suggest that Haaland is fully back on her feet or the drone of Nickelback has fully subsided. 

But she seems in a reasonable mental place. And comedically, she's truly drilling deep into her neuroses and capably extolling the quirks and failings that set her apart, her people-pleasing channelled in a constructive direction. 

What's more, she does tremendous horse and cow impressions, so no one can argue her time in rural Norway was wasted or misspent.

• Pernille Haaland: Resting Confused Face is on at Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose at 5pm.

Review date: 15 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Patter House