When I first saw the billing for Sarah Ison’s FRINGE WORLD show, You Laugh, Therefore I Am, I was immediately intrigued by how she would take a subject as highbrow as philosophy and transform it into a performance accessible to the average person. The result was a broad blend of comedy styles, a tapas-like offering of physical humour, crowd work, musical comedy, comic memoir, props, and absurdism covering some of the more well-known philosophical schools.
Her physical comedy carried much of the performance. Her ability to engage with the audience was also one of her strong points; she riled the crowd to a fever pitch. At one point, I thought someone was trying to hijack her show, but Ison respectfully managed to shift attention away, without making the audience member the butt of a joke, like many comics would. Her crowd work showcased her sharp instincts and quick thinking.
However, because her comedy traversed many topics, it occasionally dipped into niche territory, and so not all the jokes landed.
The show was billed as a philosophy-based performance, yet a significant portion leaned heavily into psychoanalysis. Her segment on Freud featured a series of repetitive “dick jokes” that, for me, went on as long as the “dicks” in question, but the crowd loved it. If this was cut she wouldn’t have been constrained by a time. She noted running behind time twice and this appeared to throw her off her game. The second time she noted this, she then seemed to rush through her section on nihilism – a veritable goldmine of gags – cutting it short, appearing to cut it to a couple of lines, culminating in a joke that failed to land.
There were also a few factual errors. For instance, Ison mentioned that Jeremy Bentham’s body resides at Oxford, while it’s actually kept at University College London. However, (full disclosure: I studied philosophy and political philosophy at university) these errors wouldn’t have been picked up by the average punter, and this section had solid jokes around Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism.
Her comic memoir segments were the evening’s most heartfelt parts. Anecdotes about her mother were delivered with genuine charm. And I can safely say, thanks to Ison, I will never look at jumpsuits the same way again.
As this was her first show for Fringe World, a few logistical hiccups cropped up—notably, the television prop she used was set at a height that many struggled to see. To her credit, she quickly acknowledged the issue and jokingly made light of it.
Overall, Sarah Ison’s performance was ambitious (I would expect nothing less from someone who worked on ABC’s Insiders, which is, for many, the best political talking heads show on Australian TV) and eclectic mix of comedy styles that, while uneven at times, showcased her potential as a dynamic performer.
C.J. O’HARTE
Sarah Ison’s You Think, Therefore I Am was presented at FRINGE WORLD from 24 – 25 Jan 2025 at Fremantle Comedy Factory.
