EDINBURGH 2023: QUITTING COMEDY Q&A

BWW catches up with Caroline Hanes and Malia Simon to chat about bringing Quitting Comedy to the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about Quitting Comedy. 

 Caroline: Quitting Comedy is a play we wrote based loosely on our experiences as young comedians in New York City. We met about three years ago and we’ve since spent hours ranting to each other about the insanity of this industry, and at some point we realized all those rants made for pretty funny material.

 Malia: The play features absurd characters based on amalgamations of people we’ve met in the comedy scene. You’ll see satirical stand-up sets including all the tropes of bad comedy. Our character actors are great. Some of them even improvise in certain scenes based on audience response, and these are some of the most fun moments in the play. We also deliver some of our own real stand-up material during the play, so ultimately it’s a hybrid of satire, actual stand-up, improv, and scripted theater. It’s very chaotic in a fun way. 

Why did you feel this was an important issue to shed light on? 

 Malia: Comedy is an extremely tough industry. Like anything in entertainment, it often feels like a pipe dream. Plus it’s even more complicated when you add in the extra special challenges reserved for women in the industry. We wanted to honestly portray the grittiness of the comedy world, since most people don’t have any insight into a comedian’s life “before the Netflix special.” 

Caroline: Or the life of the comedian who never gets a Netflix special and performs in bar basements for her entire life! I also think our play is more broadly relatable outside of the comedy world. Everyone feels like “quitting” sometimes, whether it be their career, a relationship, or anything else, and it’s important to show people that it’s normal to feel like quitting sometimes. Some days you love what you do, and some days it makes you want to cry and stick your head in a toilet, and that’s fine!

Do you think you know what to expect from the festival? 

Malia: Probably not! We both spent time at Fringe last year, enough to see that no one seemed to know what to expect at any given moment. We’ve prepared as well as we can, and now we’re just hoping for the best and diving in. 

Caroline: Since our play is brand new, we’re expecting some bumps in the road and we’re sure our script will change throughout the month by necessity, but that’s the fun of the Fringe! We’re hoping the show looks totally different between the first and last performances of the month. 

Malia: We’re also expecting some surprises when it comes to the response from international crowds. We’re working with comedy friends from the UK to rid our script of any American-specific lingo that will make audiences go: ”What the bloody hell are these American girls on about?“ (You guys say that, right?) Anyway, we’re sure to have missed a few things so that will be interesting to work out in the first few performances. 

Who would you like to come and see it? 

 Caroline: Everyone! Except children. Definitely not children. They aren’t allowed! 

Malia: We’re hoping comedians at the fringe will love our show since they’ll recognize all the comedian stereotypes and nods to “inside baseball” in the script. But we’ve also worked hard to make sure people outside of the comedy world can understand and appreciate everything too. 

Caroline: It’s a little glimpse into comedians’ lives, but also just a look at life in general. Just like how The Office technically portrays the lives of paper salesmen and Grey’s Anatomy the lives of doctors, you don’t have to be in those fields to appreciate the shows. 

What would you like audiences to take away from it? 

Caroline: That they shouldn’t take life or themselves too seriously! We’re all flawed, and every single character in our play reveals their flaws at one point or another, but we think they’re lovable anyway (except for maybe one particularly obnoxious character…come see the play to guess which one!)

 Malia: I hope audience members come away feeling like they got to know us a little and got a look in on the crazy world we live in as comics. And I hope they laugh and enjoy it and loudly tell each other how charming and relatable we are as they exit the showroom.

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