Anna Burnside reviews a dark comedic act with 'sass and substance'.
Suicide prevention as comedy? Hey, when you’re fighting for eyeballs in Edinburgh in August, you leverage whatever personal trauma you can dig out of the family tree.
Akana’s little sister killed herself in 2007, when they were 13 and 17. She now combines anti-suicide campaigning and comedy on her YouTube channel, 3 million subscribers, baby!
Knowing that monetising your sister’s death is not the best look, Akana gets the self-deprecating gags in there first. Explaining how her own ethnicity—she’s a millennial Japanese-Hawaiian—intercut with some of the highest concentrations of suicide in the population, she stresses that these are all potential subscribers.
Her show is well structured, with multi-layered gags and plenty of the self-deprecation required to carry off this material. The sister’s death is joined by a good 20 minutes about the maniac who tried to kill her: this show does what it says on the tin.
Akana means it when she says: “You say stalker, I say Netflix special.”
This segues well into a routine about her lady stalker, whose response to her restraining order is: “I respect your boundaries.”
Akara has huge charm and softens this walk on the dark side with saucy bisexual chat and some great observational gags about her adventurous-eating mother and Ukraine-volunteering father. Sass and substance is a strong mix.
Anna Akana: It Gets Darker performs at the Pleasance Courtyard from 1730-1830 until August 24 (no performances on Mondays).
Photo by Elizabeth Elder.
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