Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

How much tragedy, turmoil and trauma can one woman take? In her 34 years, Anna Akana has had an horrific stalker, a litany of mental health problems – including one called, I kid you not, ‘exploding head syndrome’ – and carries the grief of losing her sister to suicide when she was just a teenager.

How, then, is this incident-packed debut so funny? Because Akana plays everything for laughs. When every fresh revelation draws a collective intake of breath from the audience, this Japanese-Hawaiian comic’s instinct is to go straight for the gag.

It is a tribute to her younger sister Kristina, who loved laughing at pain, and a testament to Akana’s wit and resilience that the punchlines keep coming. Sure, they are dark as sin, some of them, but who are we to get touchy on her behalf when she’s the one who’s come through all this shit?

It must have taken a lot of therapy to get here – and she also has a successful YouTube channel about mental health that she flippantly describes as ‘OnlyFans for trauma’ – but she is at peace with her situation, now able to be unerringly frank with audiences and funny enough to neutralise the monsters with gags.

It Gets Darker marks a return to the stage after several years away as her stalker – subsequently hit by a restraining order – made credible death threats against her. If you’ve seen Baby Reindeer, this is ‘Daddy Reindeer’, bigger and scarier.

The comedian likens the stalking to dating, which is probably the most obvious comic route to take, but the gags come quick, and the story is compelling, with all its horrid twists and turns. As with Richard Gadd, she was frustrated by police inaction, with one officer characterising Akana as a ‘crazy cat lady’.

Crazy? Well, she does have a voice in her head giving intrusive suicidal thoughts. She’s named it Hitler - that way, she knows never to act on what it says, which is typical of her dryly funny response to awful things.

In the second half of the show, we meet the comedian’s family, and enter a whole new world of weird. There’s a mum, inured to eating the most disgusting food, and her dad, who, after his retirement, decided he needed to go to Ukraine to fight. Of all the emotional intelligence Akana displays, absolutely none of it apparently comes from him.

This is a little lighter on chuckles, especially as the stand-up leads us on a gentle dance around her sister’s suicide story to let us know that it’s OK to laugh. But once we’re there, she combats the bleak with disinfecting humour.

She also has some message behind the comedy, such as blaming the high suicide rates among young Asians at least partially on her demographic’s notoriously tough-love parenting with its pressure on success at any cost.

Akana could have chosen to up the emotional side of her traumas more for added theatrical impact, but that’s not where she’s at. Now the issues are just part of her daily life, and she treats them as the raw material for observational comedy just like anything else, just with a little more sensitivity in setting them up. Combined with a slick, tight script to pack those punchlines in, this is an impressively light and accessible show on challenging topics.

Review date: 11 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard