Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Krystal Evans’s Fringe debut is a show of two halves. The first is about her upbringing, ‘straight-up poor’, in small-town Washington state under the negligent gaze of a chaotic single mum; the second, about the trauma of being in a fatal house fire that left her with the burns alluded to in the title.

Part one is a tight, gaggy set, honed in the comedy rooms of Scotland, where she now lives (and from which she has adopted the laser-guided use of a c-bomb), and based on the quickfire pace associated with her US homeland. Even though it becomes clear her mother has an undiagnosed mental condition, Evans always sees the funny in her reckless behaviour, distilling it into pithy vignettes and giving the audience permission to laugh.

But the fire turns the story from a ‘my crazy upbringing’ yarn into something more troubling and tragic. Joking about trauma demonstrates you have power over it, is Evans’s watchword, though comedy inevitably takes a back seat to the increasingly troubling story. 

The mood flips on a dime, but nevertheless Evans can find laughs here and gradually turns the tale around into her survival in a difficult situation – not just the fire, but the dangerously dysfunctional family. 

She is not a comedian scrabbling for ideas – at least not in this incident-packed debut – as life delivers more drama than she can pack into an hour. She quotes Bill Hicks: ‘If you want to be a great comic, you’ve got to have a fucked-up childhood’ – and she had the perfect training. Her biggest fear is that the audience suffer ‘empathy fatigue’ from the catalogue of disasters.

Post-blaze, she tells of paramedics who could do with brushing up on their bedside manner, an emotionally distant dad and the titular burn camp, which is a real place, though her stay was cut short by her mother’s misbehaviour. It’s true that the seriousness of the story supercharges the laughter, as punchlines are so desperately welcome to break the tension, but these would be good jokes on their own terms. 

She is not the most electrifying of performers – she acknowledges he low energy and default sarcastic tone - but the simplicity of her delivery  serves to highlight the authenticity and impact of the episodes she talks about. And you can’t deny she’s always in control of the mood, skilfully navigating between the highs of the gags and the lows of reality.

Review date: 6 Aug 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)