Chihuahua - Adelaide Fringe Review

Image credit: Lauren Edwards

Professional millennial Lauren Edwards returns to the Adelaide Fringe after three years to fulfil her one true duty in her current stand-up comedy career, to yap for an entire hour about entering your forties and trying to keep it all together while the world feels like it's falling apart.

Living her fur-mum era vicariously through her beloved pet chihuahua, Edwards powers through a foray of her past, present, and questionably realistic view of her future.

From being the personality hire, being child-free, the ideal holiday, the housing market, tearing apart love languages and dealing with generational trauma and abandonment, she steadily delivers the spiel on all of these in her life. Making the mundane contemplatively comical is where Edwards truly shines. 

It's a steadily rapid fire of topics with a couple of pauses and mockery skits sprinkled throughout the hour, but she will win you over with her perspectives, one way or another. Such realism and cynicism don't come so easily, unless you're Edwards. 

Each segment is well paced and gives the audience enough time to fully process all of her ramblings, of which she eagerly awaits the validation of audience members. It’s not so much shouty-angry rage at the world, but rather, an internal subdued rage at the state of the world through the lens of a middle-aged woman who has definitely tolerated many, many things. 

We do see some moments where the intensity kicks up a notch, which signals that her rage is fueled by fire. I think that’s what makes this show relatable however, of which there are a heap of laughs to be had and stunned moments, whilst being able to execute her jokes well. 

Edwards is the comedian for the people, and those people are you as fellow millennials. 

Rating: ★★★★1/2
Show details: Chihuahua - Adelaide Fringe