‘I Know A Guy’ is a fabulous new addition to this year’s PBH’s Free Fringe, PBH’s Free Fringe makes the Edinburgh Fringe Festival more accessible for both artists and audiences, offering free venues to artists and free tickets to audiences. Sharon Em provides an insight into her life specifically her history with men and her crippling abandonment issues, making for a hilarious hour of fun filled anecdotes.
Em looks for the humour within her trauma, she tells the audience some funny tales about questionable parenting, chronic people pleasing, obsessive clinginess and small time criminal priests. I believe comedians like her are pros at finding a wonderful brightness in dark times, as well as this she shows a perfect vulnerability that welcomes the audience in and invites the to laugh at her trauma with her.
Em’s crowd work was pretty good too however it wasn’t a full house and she unfortunately had an almost lifeless front row. Some of which had apparently never been ‘messy’ at least once in their lives, they have never slept around, they certainly have never had one night stands and they all had their kitchen appliances set to the right time like psychopaths. Contrary to the overall strange vibe of the front row, I believe she successfully styled it out an pulled off a great show, maybe with a slightly more active audience then some of the crowd work wouldn’t be with no’s and a blaring lack of ‘yes ands’.
I believe the material itself was well written and it did not feel rushed, there was a clear throughline in which the material was structured which took the audience on a fun filled journey through Em’s life. Sharon is quite clearly a very intelligent woman, she told jokes with less obvious punchlines but the problem with that is, they do not always land because some people need a bit more time to think about it or for an all round slower person like myself it could go completely over my head. This can happen in comedy and I don’t think it is always necessarily the comedian’s fault that jokes go over peoples head’s, you cannot always account for every audience member’s reactions to certain jokes. The only other part of the material I couldn’t always keep up with was the amount of callbacks, maybe in the future there could be used slightly less frequently or maybe make the punchline bigger or the callbacks more obvious.
As a whole ‘I Know a Guy’ was a fantastic show and I recommend people go see it is on until August 25th in Venue 219 | Uno Mas at 19:15.
Read more. https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/i-know-a-guy
Theatre Scotland 
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