Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Behind the Laughter
Henry Churney and Laugh For Life Comedy
Venue: The Space
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Behind the laughter is a journey of a mental well-being teaching course. It features 6 stand up comics who have lived experience of a mental health condition. It’s a highly amusing collection of performers covering a wide range of material. While not for the faint hearted, the performance leaves its audience members feeling on a high.
Review
Henry Churney runs a comedy for mental well being course. During that course he has tutored a number of students, supporting them with the writing and development of their piece throughout the course.
Churney opens the night, and is the compere. He immediately makes the audience laugh with light hearted jokes about the menu in restaurants.
We meet six very different stand ups, who all make us laugh out loud. Sue – whose son died by suicide – describes a situation with her son. Instead of it solely being sad, the audience feel joy – the piece is a celebration of her sons life and how special he was. The character she paints of him is so vivid we can almost see him.
Robbie performs a different style of comedy – he maintained a speedy pace with a series of engaging one liners, successfully keeping the audience riveted.
Carmel shares a hilarious story based on age, public transport and meeting someone connected to dating. A combination of speed, tone and engagement with the audience make this a laugh out loud moment.
Victoria adds depth to the performance. She shares the reason she is participating, and the emotion she shares immediately makes us warm to her. She then proceeds to add a “lightness” to the conversation, by describing a yoga retreat. She also makes a spot on self depreciating gag, which got several well deserved laughs.
Frank shared a clearly well prepared, funny insight into his marriage and you cannot help but smile throughout this. He delivers gags aplenty with great achievement.
Jane’s story about the car wash added a different topic and was equally funny as her piers.
The highlight of the performance was there were no weak links. Some may find it a challenge to produce a show with 6 equally talented and engaging performers, however this was achieved here.
Equally, this wasn’t a ” pity party” – this performance turned a stereotype of mental health on its head. It subtly asked questions of its audience, left us wanting more and was full of laugh out loud moments.
It was undoubtable that a huge amount of time and effort had been undergone by these performers to hone their craft. This paid off – it was easy to forget that these were not “officially” pro performers as the calibre of comedy was so high. In order to take the performance to the next level, the performers could consider the use of Mics. It was an exceptionally hot day, and subsequently there was a big fan blasting at the back. This meant that at the times it was difficult to hear the content of some of the gags because the mic wasn’t close enough to their mouth. However, overall however this was a very enjoyable performance.
