At 14, I escaped a lethal house fire and lost everything. Comedy saved me
In previous, shorter standup shows, Krystal Evans tried to talk about her childhood experiences, but to say it didn’t work is an understatement. “Audiences just freak out,” she says with a laugh. “You can’t throw in a fucked-up joke at a 20-minute spot on a Saturday night, with a bunch of hen nights in. I realised you have to do a full show about it for people to accept it.”
Evans’s show, The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp, is about to open at the Edinburgh festival fringe. In it, she recounts a childhood that involved intense grief, neglect, surviving a lethal house fire and coping with a mentally ill mother. None of which, admittedly, sounds funny on paper, but Evans is confident in her show, unlike her previous attempts at talking about it. “I think it was a combination of not doing it in the right way and not being an experienced enough comedian at that point.”
This is her first hour-long show, although she has done shorter spots at Edinburgh, where we meet in a cafe. She is American, but lives in the city with her husband (a chef) and their two children. It was after the birth of her second child, now three, that she developed postnatal depression.
“I started getting what I guess you’d call PTSD,” she says. She would have horrible,
