An iron law of Edinburgh shows is that your trauma is your big reveal. So it’s a jolt in more ways than one when Jonny Pelham tells us, right up top, that he was sexually assaulted at the age of eight. He didn’t admit it – barely even to himself – for 17 years, but has now made a show about it and the life it’s caused him to lead. That’s not an obvious topic for comedy – but, with its flights of fantasy, awkward sexual encounters and opportunities for jet-black humour, it turns out to be a very good one.
Making us laugh isn’t the only agenda. Pelham thinks these experiences should be spoken about more widely; that paedophiles should be helped, not demonised. He liked his abuser. The experiences were pleasurable. And yet it was abuse, which he deeply repressed and which manifested in a stunted emotional life, a nosediving comedy career (his agent sent him a link to a How to Write Jokes video) and in “maladaptive daydreaming”. Pelham was, in short, happier imagining himself as a pirate than living his own life.
Sad stuff, but there’s nothing sentimental about the show, which Daniel Kitson soundalike Pelham delivers with much self-mockery and no self-pity. It finds him tempted to play a trump card when friends boast about how young they were when they first had sex. It finds him, aged 25, realising he’s never been in love, then – with the help of his therapist – taking his first tentative steps into dating and (give or take an untimely panic attack) sex.
A fine line is trod between the emotional significance of Pelham’s story and some fine jokes – like the one about patting himself on the back for fingering someone on a train. We’re in Stygian territory when he cracks wise about the statistical likelihood of his becoming an abuser himself – but that material raises questions as well as laughs, about who paedophiles are and what creates them. It’s a striking show, and far more fun than the subject gives us any right to expect.
At The Caves, Edinburgh, until 25 August.