Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Japanese Grandma Funeral
Kento Morita
Genre: Clown, Storytelling, Theatrical Clown
Venue: Playground 1 at ZOO Playground
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Kento the clown missed his grandmother’s funeral in Japan due to Covid restrictions. He’s trying to recreate the traditional rites, but it keeps going wrong. Can the audience help him achieve closure in this gentle, heartwarming comedy? Blending clown and storytelling with Japanese and Okinawan funeral customs, Kento attempts to process 108 of his grandma’s memories, along with unresolved thoughts and small, stubborn facts about her life, in a show that is both deeply personal, yet widely relatable. What begins as a failed ceremony becomes a gentle, intimate invitation to laugh, remember and let go.
Review
The lights go down and Kento already has you. He’s working the room from the very first moment, and within minutes you’re laughing so hard your face hurts. This is crowd work done brilliantly, the kind that makes you feel like you’re in on something rather than being performed at. There’s no barrier between the stage and the seats. He brings you in from the start, and you don’t even think to resist.
What he’s building is his grandmother’s portrait through numbers, each one a memory, each one part of her journey to the afterlife. It’s a ceremony, a love letter to her, and it’s all happening in red lycra with a toy keyboard. As the countdown ticks down, these rituals start crashing into one another. He’s deliberately setting himself up to fail, and every collision is funnier and more chaotic than the last. You’re watching him try to hold it together whilst it all falls apart, and it’s absolutely hilarious.
What strikes you immediately is that this isn’t traditional clowning, even though Kento is a trained clown. The skills are there, absolutely; you can see them in how he moves, how he times a beat, how he reads the room and adjusts on the fly. But they’re woven so seamlessly into the performance that they feel invisible. He’s not performing clown tricks at you. He’s just someone genuinely trying to honour his grandmother’s memory while everything goes spectacularly wrong but by being so wrong he gets it so right, and that’s what makes it so funny.
There’s bum spelling. There’s quick maths. There’s a birthday cake that becomes something else entirely. There’s a zoom funeral, and love letters. Each moment lands, and then the next one surprises you all over again. The audience is with him completely, and he knows exactly how to keep them there. You’re never afraid to participate because he’s made it safe. You trust him.
What’s remarkable is the balance he strikes. As the show progresses and the time pressure mounts, the rituals start bleeding into one another. The structure becomes almost impossible to follow, but that’s the point. It mirrors the chaos of grief, the way memories and customs and personal moments get tangled up when you’re trying to process loss. The laughter doesn’t stop; if anything, it gets bigger. But there’s something else happening underneath it. You start to feel the weight of what he’s doing.
Because here’s what matters: underneath all this laughter, there’s genuine affection. You can feel how much he loved his grandmother, how much his culture means to him. The comedy never mocks any of it. Instead, it’s his way of processing grief and honouring her memory at the same time. He’s inviting you to remember her with him, to laugh with him, to let go with him. You’re not laughing at him or his loss. You’re laughing because that’s what grief sometimes needs: the absurdity, the mess, the collision of wanting to do things right and everything falling beautifully, chaotically wrong.
The show trusts you to hold both things at once: the joy and the sorrow. It trusts you not to need it spelled out. It trusts you to understand that love and laughter and loss can all exist in the same space, and that’s not contradictory; that’s what makes us human.
When you walk out of that room, you’ve laughed harder than you expected. You’ve been moved in ways you didn’t anticipate. You’ve been part of something genuinely generous and brave and utterly joyful.
This is a show that shouldn’t be missed.
