Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

‘By the time I was 13, my mum had hit me so much it’s a miracle I’m not doing burlesque,’ says Spring Day, in a typically jet-black joke about her torrid upbringing. Indeed, it’s remarkable how engaging and well-balanced she comes across on stage, given how much trauma she has to unpack.

It’s also taken until her seventh Edinburgh Fringe show to be able to share all this – which could be a lesson to all new comics eager to unload their issues in their debut. This far into her comedy career, Day is now relaxed and confident enough as a stand-up to do the story justice.

With an abusive mother, dad with ADHD and her own cerebral palsy to contend with, she found herself sucked in to the orbit of an evangelical Christian cult in one of America’s flyover states at the age of 13. 

A hardcore speaking-in-tongues, faith-healing type of sect, the church filled in for the emotionally absent parents, while insidiously heaping on insecurities about sex and squashing her self-expression 

Her ‘church mom’ knew about the abuse at home but didn’t intervene. And it turns out the older woman had issues, too, having been scared into being a Christian at the tender age of five by vivid stories of the hellish fate that would await her if she didn’t.

Day became inculcated with the church’s twisted philosophy that ascribes any inconvenient feelings that question the cult’s activities to Satan entering her soul, and any trauma to God ‘moving in mysterious ways’.

Luckily, after 13 years of this indoctrination, Day managed to get out, with the help of a group of ‘ex-vangelicals’ who helped deprogramme her. Now married to fellow comic Tim Renkow, she has found happiness and been accepted into a new a family that actually seem to like one another. 

This isn’t exploited for an over-emotional climax, told as matter-of-factly as the more miserable aspects of her story. However, it’s clear she’s come to know what healthy relationships look like, and that life is better lived without the prospect of an eternity in the fiery pits of hell hanging over her.

Day has a deep well of material about how crazy the church was, even if she skips over a lot of the details. And some of the gags feel tacked or rather than organic, obvious, if understandable, attempts to course-correct the narrative back to something lighter. But the peek into her screwed-up experiences and the toxicity of the cult is always fascinating.

Review date: 24 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard