#SNAPCHATZ Episode 23: Candidates for Edinburgh’s pantheon of legend

I’m a stand up comedian and my new show is an hour of comedy about discovering you have a chronic illness, the hospital stay that follows, and the adaptations you have to make in your life – with jokes!

I’ve always tried to make big subjects accessible with humour, and have poured more heart into this than ever. It’s the most theatrical outing of mine yet, and I think will surprise a few people.

Well as my show is about living with bowel disease, I would say people who have lived with the condition who can relate. However as an audience that might mean a lot of interruptions for toilet breaks. So I guess my idea audience would be a room of people who have *just been cured* of bowel disease. 

My show is a cabaret-style line-up variety show with lots of acts, all performed by myself. This came from a beginning to make a show with 5 people and then not receiving the arts council funding to fully realise the show. Rather than cancelling the whole thing, I decided to see if I could perform it myself. The show is called Lucy & Friends as a sort of joke (given it’s a solo show) and because it is the audience who therefore help me out. There’s kind of a general theme of friendship in the show, which sounds cheesy and I guess it is! But basically, the show is also a sort of friendship recruitment process haha. 

My show is a messy combination of theatre, comedy and performance art. It’s a party and a celebration, but it has its darker moments. It’s absurd and strange and a bit out-there I guess. Pretty much the most important thing to me is to make people laugh. I hope they think more deeply about the show later because there’s a lot kind of bubbling underneath it, but essentially it is a very silly hour. 

Because my work takes inspiration from lots of areas of performance I also find it interesting to see who turns up from say the more comedy end of the spectrum, through traditional theatre or my performance art pals.  

I mean any audience feels like an achievement haha. I’ve been to Edinburgh twice before with my show Triple Threat in 2016 and then Post Popular in 2019 and brilliantly those shows sold out. I feel a bit out of the loop now but that’s also an exciting feeling because I almost feel like I’m starting over… particularly because I’ve always had other people in my shows but this is my first genuinely solo hour. 

Something I actually love about Edinburgh is the diverse range of audience you get in one night… like some people who just stumbled in, someone who has read a review but otherwise would never have bothered, and your peers and people who have supported you for some time (the latter often tell me they partly just come to enjoy watching the journey of new audience members faces watching me haha). I guess although my show is loud and participatory and fun, I do actually want the audience to (shock horror) listen! So I’m trying to create that kind of sweet spot between an audience who gets on board and has a laugh, but who will also shut up when you want to bang on about yourself for a bit! 

My show CHRIS GRACE: AS SCARLETT JOHANSSON is a loving biographical look at one of our greatest living actors and an exploration of identity, equality, casting, and who is “allowed” to do what in today’s climate. It also has an overweight Asian man attempting to do a cartwheel!

There is no other show in the Fringe that involves a mildly famous Asian-American comedian dressing up like Scarlett Johansson in “Black Widow” for the slowest possible fight sequence you’ve ever witnessed. Okay, it’s Fringe, there might be ONE other show like this… 

Either a completely sold out house with enthusiastic Fringers from all over the world, or Scarlett Johansson buys out all the seats and sits in the center row, alone, silently judging. And then she gives me 45 minutes of notes and feedback.