Rachel Kaly: Hospital Hour review – trauma-comedy reaches new extreme

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Witnessing 9/11 from school as a six-year-old is one of many mental distresses recounted in the New York comic’s often piercingly bleak set Whenever you think trauma-comedy has reached its apogee, along comes a show to make you reel – and laugh too, ideally – at the depths of another clown’s despair. Step forward one half of the duo behind the hit Too Far podcast Rachel Kaly, whose show itemises the mental distresses that have seen her in therapy since 12 September 2001 (when she was six, and schooled close to the twin towers) and hospitalised more than 300 times. Small wonder the New Yorker voices her fringe debut in a slightly stupefied monotone. If all this had happened to me, I’d be dazed too. Is the ratio too high in Hospital Hour between the outlandish realities of Kaly’s ill health, on the one hand, and actual jokes on the other? It probably is – but often the bare facts themselves, plus a little personal context, elicit aghast laughter, as the 28-year-old describes the emotionally bruising behaviour (at best) of her Middle Eastern father, having her first period in sync with the execution of Saddam Hussein, or drip-feeding herself burrito smoothies when – just another day for Kaly, this – she lost the ability to swallow. At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews