Jenny Gorelick SORRY Review: 4 Stars

Jenny Gorelick: SORRY (Fringe Comedy Review) 4 Stars ****

Studio portrait of comedian Jenny Gorelick against a deep red background, wearing a vibrant red dress with a rose detail, looking directly at the camera with hands behind her head, promoting her show Jenny Gorelick: SORRY.

Contrary to the show’s title, Jenny Gorelick is unapologetically ‘just a girl’. Her dress is pink, her makeup is glittery, and her jokes about Real Housewives are seemingly unlimited.


And like many other girls (or 34-year-old women, but who’s counting?), Gorelick has at least an hour’s worth of material on the perils of modern dating. The New York-based comedian navigates through this material seamlessly from first dates, to marriage, to motherhood, making the audience blush and laugh in almost equal amounts.

Crowd work and a PowerPoint are used to hilarious effect, despite some technical glitches. The screenshots of messages, dating app profiles, and photos make you feel as though you could be sitting next to your best friend at dinner as she shows you the evidence of her latest escapade on her phone.

If there’s one small gripe, it’s that the setting is so familiar; occasionally the topics can start to feel slightly stale. If you’re a young woman on social media, you’ve likely already dissected the gendered implications of Justin Bieber vs Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella performances, or the fact that men seem to be incapable of saying sorry.

Yet, each time, Gorelick recaptures the audience with a joke that is just clever enough that you’ve probably never thought about it that way before, and just shocking enough that even if you had, you probably wouldn’t say it out loud.

Despite the show revolving around the tribulations of dating and the inadequacies of men, it is buoyantly positive. It will likely leave you wanting to schedule your next date immediately, if not for the romance, then for the story you’ll get out of it.

Gorelick’s charm is undeniable. At the end of the show, a group of girls asked Gorelick what she’s doing afterwards, no doubt hoping, as we all secretly were, that she would become a new best friend. It was that way.

If you’re planning a girls’ night out this Fringe, Jenny Gorelick is the woman to see.

Jenny Gorelick: SORRY, The Studio at Monkey Barrel Comedy, 3rd to 30th August, not 17th or 18th

Words: Juliet Gartside

Photo credit: Emilio Madrid