Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Innumerable thirtysomething comedians have lamented their lost youth – but Marise Gaughan is one of the few to embrace the cosy mundanity of more settled times. And that’s because she’s already lived the life of messy, rebellious extremes, giving her a vast depository of war stories to share with us.

The frank, confessional tone is set early doors, as she speaks of wild parties in Chicago and seeking sex with old men – very old men sometimes – in Los Angeles, as she sought a way to fund her lifestyle.

Although I say ‘confessional’ the ex-Catholic is not expressing remorse in her stories, but just aims to give context to them, delivering them in a matter-of-fact way but with an acute self-awareness. However, you don’t need to be a psychologist to make a connection with her father’s death being so quickly followed by her search for sugar daddies.

Gaughan also tries to block out emotions through drink, eventually leading to rehab and sobriety. ‘It’s objectively a boring life,’ the Irish comic notes; she’s not an evangelist for abstention. 

At other points she runs from a reality she doesn’t want to face by heading to Barcelona and then Morocco, where she hooked up with a surf instructor with an amusingly weak grasp of English idioms.

There’s obviously a bleak version of this story to be told, but Gaughan has already covered that in her sometimes harrowing memoir, Trouble. That leaves her free here to lean in to the more comic, absurd aspects of the extreme situations she got herself into. The darkness that underpins these colourful stories gives them grit and intensity that hikes the potential for laughs. But sometimes she’s just taking the piss out of her own boobs – it’s not all soul-baring.

The comic claims her abrasive personality makes her ‘not likeable’ but the candour and wit with which she lets us relive her experiences vicariously - and safely - means you can’t help feeling a connection. The result is a consistently amusing hour of substantial first-person storytelling, in which Gaughan finally gets a redemption arc by figuring out what it is she wants out of life.

Review date: 5 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive)