We chat with Jewish Canadian comedian Zoe Brownstone, after her debut Edinburgh Fringe Show, A Bite of Yours.
The debut Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, A Bite of Yours, from Jewish Canadian comic and quirky best friend Zoe Brownstone answered all of your questions about love, heartbreak and bilingual visa break ups. Zoe has been performing stand- up since before dating apps existed, and yet she still does not know how love works, if you can even believe that.
Zoe has been involved in the performing arts from a young age, though it was originally theatre which captured her attention: “I studied theatre and I was an actor when I was a kid. That was the plan, but the industry in Canada is really tricky and competitive. When I graduated, I went travelling for a while but I couldn’t find myself. A friend of mine suggested a writing class, and there was a show at the end of the course. I performed some of my jokes and they weren’t great but I figured I can try this.”
Stand-up comedy has given Zoe more freedom than her experience as an actor did: “With stand-up you can perform wherever you want and do whatever you want and you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, which after 15 years as an actor, was so mind-blowing.”
The routine Zoe performed at the Fringe Festival is centred around her own experiences. Most notably with moving to the Netherlands for love and then being stuck there after a breakup — at first due to COVID, and then only due to pure stubbornness, believing that if she stayed she still had a chance to rescue the relationship. While there Zoe had written work published around Judaism and the Holocaust.
Despite some embellishment, the narrative Zoe relates to sticks closely to the actual events which took place: “I would say the events are all pretty much all exactly how they happened. There’s definitely embellishment when it comes to the timeline. There is a little bit of overexaggeration, but I think it’s mostly the overexaggeration that we do in our own minds when we retell something.”
Another central theme of the show is the lessons that Zoe learned growing up watching rom-coms, and how those don’t necessarily reflect real love: “I grew up in the 90s and I was raised on 10 Things I Hate About You, Never Been Kissed, Ever After. It’s such a unique bubble in film, where women had a personality. We didn’t just raise children, we had jobs and could talk back to our boyfriends, but there was still a massive gap between the heteronormative gendered roles of men and women in a relationship, and we were 10 years away from seeing any kind of interracial romance or LGBTQ stories in a mainstream movie. And so for the first 15 years of my life I was searching for a very specific thing with love – what I saw in film and television.”