Sasha Ellen: My MILF-Shake Brings All The Boys To The Yard

Edinburgh Fringe – Just The Tonic

My MILF-Shake Brings All The Boys To The Yard is a sarcasm-littered show where Ellen unpacks and openly discusses everything from the concept of MILF-dom to therapy, using visual aides to signpost throughout her show. In the use of the doctor’s report, there’s almost an attempt to explain the context behind the words of this report. This show certainly goes in unexpected directions before coming round again with a logic maybe only Ellen can see. The topics aren’t always engaging, but they’re certainly unique. She comes up with these elaborate jokes that come together very creatively at the end, a payoff she spends the entire showing setting up.

Because of the descriptive storytelling that Ellen employs, a lot of humour in Ellen’s material is reliant more on tone than the standard joke format. This allows her to continuously layer her material and give us more and more reasons to laugh each time. The issue with this is that’ it’s not always clear what the joke is or if she’s making one rather than just some form of being exasperated/ outraged. And as this is the main technique she uses throughout, it does get repetitive to the point where her cadence becomes predictable.

“A witty, understated hour”

Throughout her hour the social and personal delves into the occasional dark place. It’s really structured like a debate response, and so verbose that as Ellen pieces together her material that is really seems like My MILF-Shake Brings All The Boys To The Yard is her Ninety-five Theses.

Ellen engages with us constantly to the point where it seems like she’s having a conversation to the point where some of her prepared material presents itself as ad-libs. She constantly tries to draw us in and push us into a bigger laugh, and her rate of success in this is high.

As far as comedy hours go, My MILF-Shake Brings All The Boys To The Yard is a good hour to spend. Ellen brings the jokes and the laugh, and knows how to turn a room around in her favour. It’s a witty, understated hour where Ellen uses real-world experiences that usually only bring outrage and frustration, to bring us together through our collective experience in laughter.

By Katerina Partolina Schwartz

Photo Credit: Karla Gowlett