At nine o’clock on Tuesday night at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a clinical psychologist sat in a comfy chair wielding a notebook while three comedians took to the stage for a short set. For those with a keen psychological eye, comedians may reveal more about themselves than they intend, but what happens when there’s a shrink on hand to help us peer behind the performative mask? This is precisely what happens in Shrink Wrapped, a show developed and hosted by comedian Robyn Perkins.
The night I attended the psychologist was Dr Edel McGlanaghy, and the comics were Ethan Cavanagh, Raul Kohli, and Perkins herself. Each did a short set of about five minutes after which McGlanaghy asked a penetrating question about their “sense of self” with reference to the material they brought. It quickly became clear that try as they might to use this question to gain one more laugh from the crowd, the question always landed a bit too squarely, a bit too close to the bone to not throw them a bit off their game, reveal something you usually don’t see at your usual standup gig. This was followed by a “group therapy” session facilitated by the resident shrink.
It bears saying that this event starts with a disclaimer that “legally” this is not therapy, but rather entertainment. Each participant has consented, and care has been taken in advance to guard against material that is too private or sensitive, there is a safe word, and all were game to go. Disclaimer or not, there was little doubt that some serious therapy was happening in the room that night.
Perkins, who was the most transparent of the three, disclosed her struggle with “crippling self-doubt” that belied her confident presentation on stage; Cavanagh, in reference to being a straight man often misperceived as gay, was visibly taken aback at McGlanaghy’s implication that misogyny in his humour, implying it was used as a defence (an interpretation I thought was a bit unfair); Kohli, who is an Englishman born to a Hindu Indian father and a Sikh mother, opened with a joke about being insulted in Scotland for being English, the first time he’d been racially abused for his accent rather than the colour of his skin, inviting McGlanaghy’s question about how he might use humour to defuse being the subject of racist abuse growing up.
Curious about the shrink, sympathetic to the comedians
As a therapist myself I was intellectually curious about what I may have said were I in McGlanaghy’s shoes. My empathy, however, was with the comedians who, though game for the show, were clearly uncomfortable at times, either at the dropping of an unanticipated truth-bomb, or perhaps feeling mis-recognised by inaccurate interpretations that were not born of months of therapeutic work, but arose in the space of a few minutes in front of a live audience: but this was the very nature of this risque event.
There is something deeply unsettling when a powerful psychological interpretation happens in front of an audience, instead of within the tight frame of a therapeutic relationship. While we were told explicitly that this was not therapy, these interpretations were not just showmanship either; they were real, if not always in this spectator’s opinion spot on, or even appropriate: but then again, how could they be? I say this from the benefit of being a spectator rather than the gig’s shrink, which, I must say, as something of a showman myself, strangely appealed to me.
Whether my unsettled feeling was miscalibrated or not would be up to the performers to confirm or deny. But the danger and risk of this experiment is an illustrative one, and it tells us more about our relationship with emotional truth than what the profession may say on whether the show is ethical or not.
Why nobody laughs alone
It turns out that psychotherapy and humour share a long-standing relationship with each other. In Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) he writes that jokes are irreducibly social because in addition to the person telling the joke, you need someone who gets the pleasure from its telling. The pleasure is, in Freud’s libido model, a discharge of energy to the listener, meaning that it releases something, something emotional. For Freud a “tendentious” joke, one that’s fuelled by aggression or sexuality (a popular variety of joke in standup), needs a further position filled, even if nobody is present to fill it: the one it is aimed at. In this show that position was often taken by the self (in a self-deprecating joke), by a fellow comedian, and sometimes even by the shrink.
Standup is often tendentious, that’s what gives you a sense of skin in the game, risk, and even danger. The sets were under the comedians’ control, but the “group therapy” session that followed was generally not, and that’s when we started to see things, sometimes hysterically, sometimes alarmingly, come undone. Much of what we discovered that night was that all of the comedians, in their different styles, had used humour as a defence to gain back control of something that historically had eluded it and made them vulnerable. What was not discussed was the control the shrink holds to disarm the participants, which is exactly where the risk lies, and the consequences cannot be predicted.
In the quick back and forth of the dialogue, a true interpretation can cut very close to the bone without the benefit of the preparation one generally takes to make such an interpretation. Equally, a misjudged or simply wrong interpretation can come across with confidence, sounding like a truth that leaves the recipient feeling powerless to counter. A room of a hundred people has already heard it. This is why in a therapy situation such moves are delivered in a thoughtful and timely way, are made in negotiation between therapist and client, and re-calibrated with reference to “fit” between therapist and client. Shame is one of the greatest inhibitors to honest disclosure in therapy. At a comedy event at the Edinburgh Fringe, the potential to shame is enormous.
When comedians are running their sets, the material is theirs, they wrote it, they chose it, and they turned up on stage to deliver it. How guarded they are in that material and delivery will be specific to each comedian. While Perkins and her rotating cast of performers and psychologists are careful to frame the show as science comedy rather than therapy, nobody can control what arises spontaneously. You can demonstrate science with liquid nitrogen and Bunsen burners wearing goggles and gloves and still get frostbite or a burn. Psychology is just as live, and nearly as dangerous.
That frame is doing real ethical work, exactly as the therapeutic frame does, and it is also a necessary fiction. Something therapeutic plainly happens. A person hears a pattern in their own material that they had not known was a pattern, and the room goes quiet for a beat before it laughs. Therapeutic work happened in that show. I saw it land, and I should know! If nothing therapeutic had been happening the evening would have been a dud, a psychology lecture with jokes, and it was not that.
Perhaps it’s just as well that McGlanaghy’s research includes the adverse effects of psychological therapy. The person in that comfy chair has spent her working life studying where this sort of thing goes wrong, which is roughly the qualification you would want in such an endeavour.
While the traditional therapeutic encounter often describes itself as a “safe space”, it is not risk-free, though it is, justifiably, safer than doing it at an open mic. The risks here are worth naming: the risk of an interpretation that is either too accurate, or plain wrong; whether there is after-care for this particularly perilous form of comedy; the danger of the therapist going for laughs or appearing clever at the expense of their duty of care (I’d be terrified to fall afoul of this one). At the same time, these are consenting adults, and even more so comedians. Who out there is more experienced at putting their egos up for the public to undermine? While I doubt that their consent can be truly informed because they cannot predict what will happen, I trust they’ve thought it through enough, and are adult enough to make these choices for themselves.
The therapy police
This provocative piece of entertainment opens up big questions for the mental health profession too. The public understanding of therapy has changed enormously in twenty years. Our response has far too often been to mock the professionals who’ve broken out of the clinical bubble into the popular press, or complain about the non-professional influencers who’ve hijacked real psychology for soundbite pop-psych on Instagram and TikTok. Our concerns are real, but so is the necessity to provide accurate insights about the process of psychotherapy in accessible ways. An hour like this may do more for how people understand what a psychotherapist actually does than a boring public service announcement or informational website. The clinical instinct to police it is both necessary and potentially defensive in its own right.
In the end the show works because even though it states it’s not therapy, therapy is happening. The show, with great credit to Robyn Perkins, is a highly risky endeavour, but one that I think pays off in the end, and I’d like to see more.
Also, it was really, really, funny.
Shrink Wrapped runs in London too at Big Belly Bar & Comedy Club on the Southbank and occasionally at the Top Secret Comedy Club. Dates go up on Robyn Perkins' site.
Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, and keynote speaker who applies depth psychology and psychoanalytic thinking to technology, AI, social media, and modern culture. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking and his newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.
Sounds fascinating! I'd never heard of this before. I'm going to check out their London shows!