Should some subjects be off-limits for comedy?
In her sell-out show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Amanda Knox tells a joke about her daughter’s favourite game called “Momma goes to Italy” in which she grabs the bars of a jungle gym at their local playground and screams, “Let me out! Let me out!”
Knox’s conviction for the murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in 2007, her years spent behind bars in an Italian prison, and her subsequent acquittal 11 years ago, made her famous and infamous around the world.
“Pigeonholed as either a true crime or tragic figure”, her one-woman set “Cartwheel” – named after claims by Italian prosecutors that she had turned cartwheels in a police station shortly after Kercher’s death – is, she said, “me going back to my roots and trying to reclaim who I was before all the bad stuff happened”, said The New York Times.
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While it may be a surprise that Knox is trying stand-up at all, it’s “arguably even riskier” to debut such material in Britain, given the “mixed reputation” she has in Kercher’s country of birth, said The New York Times. The 39-year-old mother-of-two’s foray into comedy has “also raised questions about who has the right to tell a story on stage”.
After opening night, the Daily Mail published an article with the headline “Is there anything ‘Foxy Knoxy’ won’t do for attention – or money?” More than 42,000 people have signed a petition calling for the show to be cancelled, and Kercher’s sister Stephanie recently told the BBC she was afraid the event risked “normalising violence against women by making light of such a harrowing event”.
“No one walking out of the theatre could possibly reach that conclusion”, said Tristram Fane Saunders in The Telegraph. If anything, it was “too tasteful”; a “good-faith attempt by a novice performer to use the medium of stand-up comedy to tell her own story inoffensively, to the best of her moderate abilities”.
While some have argued it is a “disgrace that she’s telling it at all – and profiting from it”, classifying “Cartwheel” as comedy may have been her biggest “misstep”, said Brian Logan in The Guardian. Doing so “risks looking insensitive and inaccurately describes the show”, but, “judging by the evidence” and the very public outcry, “Knox would be damned whatever she did”.
Humour has “always helped people to process terrible events” and “for that reason, great stand-up can sometimes be a source of profound catharsis”, said The Telegraph.
Nowhere is this more true than at the world’s most prestigious performing arts festival, where Fringe comics often draw on dark subjects and distressing personal experiences.
Richard Gadd’s 2019 Festival show about being stalked was turned into the worldwide Netflix phenomenon “Baby Reindeer”, while comedian Edd Hedges’ 2017 Festival debut, “Wonderland”, based on the story of a man who stabbed his mother and her friend 97 times, sparked a hit podcast series.
This year, Australian comedian Frankie McNair has won rave reviews for a set filled with jokes about her own experience of being sexually abused as a child.
