Sad Girl Songs - Edfringe 2025
- persistentandnasty
- Aug 20, 2025
- 5 min read
Gwen Coburn is a comedian and musician who uses her vocal physiology degree to sing beautifully about terrible things.
Called "a funny, foul-mouthed female Noel Coward" by the Orlando Weekly, she's charmed audiences from Elgin to Edmonton with songs about daddy issues and depression while wearing sparkles and now she is bringing her show Sad Girl Songs to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Can you give us a sneak peek into your show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe? What can audiences expect when they come to see your performance?
Sad Girl Songs is about comedy, both as an industry that has been harming and quietly exiling women, and as an artform that helps many of those same women survive. It's also about Medusa. It's basically a meta-theatrical drama disguised as a musical comedy show. Imagine Gadsby's Nanette mixed with the musical comedy of Flo and Joan or Rachel Bloom, and then make it a dark genre-bending play.
You can expect songs like "Thank You For Not Murdering Me," plus I turn some truly awful Bumble profiles into musical numbers. There's Greek mythology, a ted talk on snakes, and a ragtime number about the clitoris. It's about trying to hold onto comedy when everything's falling apart, and somehow making the darkest stuff hilarious.
The Edinburgh Fringe is known for its vibrant and diverse atmosphere. How do you plan to engage with the festival audience and create a memorable experience for them?
My favourite comedy moments are when everyone in the room discovers something together - like we're all figuring out how to laugh at something impossible. There's the little things, like the hand-made crying eye earrings I've crafted to give audiences and the gorgeous stickers created by the genius designer Erin Mabee (the one of a sad, sexy Venus sitting on her shell is my favourite)
It's also about the show. We worked really hard to create a piece that invited everyone in the room to look at a hard issue together, and to know that they are being seen and held. Patriarchy hurts everyone, and it can be difficult to feel brave enough to look at it all together. Our hope is that this show speaks that discomfort aloud and helps audiences make peace with it. Also the song about Emotional Labor is really catchy, so folks will have it stuck in their head for a while.
As a performer at the Edinburgh Fringe, what are you most excited about? Are there any specific aspects of the festival that you are looking forward to exploring?
This is my first Edinburgh Fringe, so honestly everything feels exciting and terrifying. I'm most looking forward to finding my people and connecting with folks who share my sense of art and my values– is that too big a goal? I don't think it is, but I guess we will see!
I'm excited to see shows that make me say "amazing, I want to do that" and shows that make me say "amazing, I could never do what they just did."
But my secret mission is finding a perfect reading spot - good tea, comfy chairs, the kind of place where you can disappear into a book. I'll probably only have like an hour for this the entire month, but I'm determined to make it happen.
Your show incorporates elements of feminism and women's experiences. Could you share how these themes are woven into the narrative or performance? What inspired you to explore these particular topics?
The show started because I kept meeting all these brilliant women who'd left comedy after different experiences of harassment or inappropriate experiences, and their stories were way too similar to mine. After getting diagnosed with PTSD, I realized this was a larger pattern.
I started thinking a lot about how we've been telling the same stories about women for thousands of years. Like Medusa gets assaulted and then turned into a literal monster for it. Europa's story is basically over after the rape. These ancient narratives are still present in so much of our daily lives, and it's wild how they shape everything from workplace dynamics to how people treat survivors.
I don't have some master plan to fix patriarchy - I just want people to look at this stuff together and maybe laugh about how absurd it all is. I find that really powerful.
Have you encountered any unique challenges or obstacles in the industry? How do you navigate these challenges, and what advice would you give to other women pursuing careers in the arts?
Oh boy. The comedy world creates trauma and then acts like the women dealing with PTSD are the problem. It's not just individual bad actors - it's how the whole system works. We disappear people instead of fixing anything. We haven't really gotten to a system of reparative justice, or figured out how to reintegrate women who were harmed and have new access needs.
Living with PTSD while doing theatre means getting really good at knowing what you need and asking for it. I'm working with Health in Mind Edinburgh during the festival because taking care of myself actually lets me do better, braver work. I also have about a million different plans and tools for when the hard of fringe inevitably coincides with the hard of PTSD.
I guess I would say, in terms of advice, that you don't need perfect answers to start making things better. Find people who get it, use humour as survival, and remember that being vulnerable on stage is what creates real connection. Also, your trauma is valid even if it doesn't look like what people expect trauma to look like.
What do you hope audiences will take away from your show, especially in terms of the feminist and women-centric themes? Is there a specific message or emotion you aim to leave them with?
Shared humanity, some dark feminist jokes, and an ear worm about emotional labour. There's something magic about a whole room laughing at complicated, heavy stuff together - it stops being this isolating thing and becomes something we can actually deal with.
I want people who recognize their own experiences to feel seen and taken care of. And I had this one guy tell me the show made him think differently about power dynamics in his relationships, which was cool. I've had women tell me they have their own court cases or hearings coming up, and the show made them feel not alone. Which was honestly the best reaction I could have hoped for.
We're all dealing with these massive, impossible questions, but at least we don't have to figure it out alone.
Show Details:
· Show: Sad Girl Songs: A Comedy Show
· Venue: Greenside @ George Street - Ivy Studio
· Time: 15:10-16:05 (55 minutes)
· Dates: August 1-23, 2025 (not 10th or 17th)
Social Media:
· Website: gwencoburn.com
· Instagram/Social: @sadgirlsongsplay
