Comedy Review: Eleanor Conway: You May Recognise Me From Tinder, Laughing Horse @ The Free Sisters (Venue 272), Edinburgh

Disarmingly frank and filthy, Eleanor Conway powers the energy of a sex-positive comedy club set through the regretful, introspective candour of an Edinburgh hour.

3

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If you’re after an early evening sharing of someone’s three-part, blowjob technique mantra, then this is the instruction course for you.

A perennial single, Conway prowls her venue like she does dating apps, seeking like-minded souls to share her lustiest thoughts with. Such is its recurring presence in her hour that her vagina is a stand-alone character, named Jenny incidentally.

Pragmatic rather than especially progressive when it comes to dating, Conway argues her case with cold, hard economic logic.

Single since 2007, she rides Tinder’s conveyor belt of casual hook-ups and gleefully mines her triumphs and disasters for material. But there’s an ever-present ache of melancholy beneath the brazen gaiety.

At 41, she protests her loveability and discloses her mental scars: her parents split; her relatively recent sobriety and the rather desperate intensity she inflicts on any prospective long-term partner.

Strikingly too, she begins to blur the boundaries between digitally-enabled, casual sex and prostitution, once again, defending her lifestyle and holding nothing back. Amusingly related, a comedy show is as good a forum as any to raise these issues, I guess.

Until 25 August. Today 7pm

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