If you thought trauma-comedy reached its limit with Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, buckle up: the American comic Avital Ash is here to workshop her suicide note. A neat idea for gallows-humour standup, right? So you might think, until the tears well up in Ash’s eyes. There is lots to recommend this Edinburgh debut by the Florida native: Ash’s pin-sharpness and devilry; the audacity of her conceit, and how near the knuckle she takes it. Until she takes it too far, into territory the 37-year-old appears still to find upsetting – which makes it hard to laugh along.
There is no pretence we are in anywhere other than the oil-slick blackest of comic terrain here, with jokes upfront about the Holocaust, how sexy Jeffrey Epstein is and the suicide of Ash’s mother when the comedian was a little girl. It has loomed over Ash all her life and she recounts reassembling the story of her mother’s death here, alongside Ash’s lifelong relationship (courtesy, she argues, of her strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing) with shame, anxiety and self-hatred. If that doesn’t sound like lols all round, well, it’s not meant to be.
There is serious stuff at play here, including sexual assault, and Ash fashions it into an emotionally compelling tale. She wrings bitter humour from her material too, as – in a spirit of pragmatic inquiry – she shares drafts of her suicide note. Might it be made funny enough to keep grief at bay? There are mordantly amusing reflections too on the phrase “I just want to be happy” (as if that were a modest ambition) and the word “rapist”.
Ash has been through a lot, and now considers herself “a waste of space who doesn’t deserve to live”. The more straight-faced she issues these judgments, and the more distressed she looks to recall this or that emotional atrocity, the further the show slips comedy’s moorings. I’m all for laughter excavated from tragedy, for jokes that come from the heart. But watching Ash’s show I can’t help but call into question: should feelings this raw be put on stage, and obliged to be funny?
• At Monkey Barrel @ the Tron, Edinburgh, until 27 August
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• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
