THERE’S a popular formula to a lot of Edinburgh Festival Fringe stand-up shows. The comic keeps the audience happy and engaged with jokes and stories for 40 minutes and then hits them with something sad.
They shift the mood, spending five to 10 minutes revealing something traumatic or sensitive, after which they prick the tension with some more levity until taking their bow when the hour-long emotional journey is up.
Edinburgh-based Krystal Evans tosses that structure away in her stunning debut hour, The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp. There are painful revelations all the way through but the jokes don’t stop coming. She tells her harrowing true story with such comedic skill that any lulls in laughter are entirely within her control.
Evans’s early years were heartbreakingly hard. Her mother’s mental illness resulted in instability, chaos, poverty and shame, and when Evans was 14 the family home burnt down. This is a spoiler-free zone, but the consequences of that night were unbelievably tragic, the revelations leaving the audience open-mouthed at times. And yet, somehow, laughing.
“One of the through-lines of the show is how humour has helped me through the hardest times,” says Evans, a finalist in the Scottish New Comedian and Leicester Mercury New Comedian of the Year awards in 2019 and a regular panellist on BBC Scotland’s Breaking the News.
“The women on my mum’s side of the family are so funny. Making fun of each other was the way we communicated. My aunt would always make the darkest joke at the most inappropriate moment and I loved it.”
Describing the intense sense intimacy that she quickly magics up in the room, Evans continues: “The best bits of the show are the really hard bits I’m making fun of. It’s like making fun of a family member in a way you wouldn’t with a stranger.”
On stage, Evans shares some remarkable details about her mother’s behaviour – particularly her indiscriminate and destructive need for attention – and the impact this had on the family.
It’s natural to wonder how she feels about revealing so much. Some might argue that exposing her mother’s character in this way treads a delicate path in terms of privacy but Evans is adamant that what she’s doing is more than fair.
“I’m holding her accountable and my experience is valid,” she says, before quoting a joke from the show: “If she didn’t want me to talk about her on stage she shouldn’t have introduced me to stand-up comedy at a very young age and then traumatised me.”
Getting a laugh out of pain is in her DNA. “My only reservation was that the audience would judge me,” says Evans, hinting at the lingering – and completely undeserved – sense of shame felt by the children of people with behavioural problems.
“This is my story. I know what I grew up with and trust my perceptions. I’m not going to let anyone bully me into not saying the truth. For a really long time I didn’t but I have this important story to tell and I want to tell it. It feels right to tell it.”
Evans didn’t really start doing comedy until she was 30 – seven years ago. She had met her future husband, Scottish chef Stuart Ralston, while working in hospitality in the US and they moved around before settling in Edinburgh and opening the acclaimed Aizle restaurant (and later Noto).
Evans says: “Our dream had been to open a restaurant but that was his dream, really. Less than a year into it, I realised I didn’t want to do that and I really needed to do comedy.”
It was having their first child that really gave her “the kick up the ass” she needed.
“I looked at this baby and thought, ‘I can’t have him look at his mum and see a husk of a human being who never pursued what she should have done’. I knew that, to be a good parent, I really needed to do this.”
Evans did a few sets at Red Raw, the Edinburgh Stand’s new acts show, and there was no going back.
Another well-worn entertainment saying, attributed to Mark Twain, is that humour is tragedy plus time. Add charisma, intelligence and genuine funny bones and what you’ve got is an exceptional stand-up show. Go see Evans before she’s huge.
Krystal Evans: The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp, Aug 4-27; previews Aug 2-3; two-for-one, Aug 7-8; 7.35pm, Monkey Barrel (The Hive 2), edfringe.com