Felicity Ward: What If There Is No Toilet?

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With comedians up and down Edinburgh this year probing their various psychological issues, it’s still rare to see a mainstream comic quite so brazen as to present a full hour on an uncomfortable illness. Few can be less comfortable to talk about than irritable bowel syndrome, with a side helping of generalised anxiety disorder. But that’s where Felicity Ward goes in this brilliantly funny and cathartic hour, which has the Friday night crowd whooping and laughing along as if nothing could be funnier than regularly shitting your pants.

Ward makes it explicitly clear from the start that we are allowed to laugh about these things: it’s not “funny bit, serious bit, funny bit”. The stage is littered with bog rolls, along with an air freshener and a model toilet, breaking any taboo before Ward even walks on to the stage. She even encourages a shout-out from anyone in the audience who’s suffered a mental illness, and the crowd’s willingness to go with her is testament to her honest, unaffected and irreverent style.

As always with Ward, there’s plenty of spirited rudeness, as well as some truly clever lines; I particularly liked her takedown of her regular meditation sessions as “a beautiful daily reminder that I am forever alone with my own thoughts”. It’s as funny as any weekend-friendly standup show on the Fringe, but it’s also more than that: without wanting to strain the toilet analogy too far, Ward has produced something substantial, nutty and surprisingly consistent. It’s well worth going if you can get there in time.