“Enthusiastically peculiar” and “Endearingly essentric” are two labels attached to stand-up comic and writer Emily-Anne ‘Elf’ Lyons. The Latitude Festival blurb, where she performed this year was a tad more specific, calling her an “award-winning, immortal, red-hatted comedian and storyteller from London.”  She’s a mixture of the surreal, saucy and the strange covering everything from budget erotica to very physical impressions of a Dressage horse.

With two theatre degrees, Elf is a founder member of ‘The Secret Comedians’, a small comedy collective who perform satirical evenings in East London. She is also a recent alumni of the Paris-based clown school, L’Ecole Philippe Gaulier and wants to kill her mother….in a comedic way of course. Her current show PELICAN is being performed nightly at the VooDoo Rooms as part of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe (or if your savvy and lazy, the ‘Edfringe’). It’s based on her mother’s complaint that she didn’t feature prominently enough in her daughter’s comedy routines, so she was made the subject of a show, relishing the madness of mothers and the age-old fear of turning into your mum. “Lyons is endearingly awkward, sexually frank and delightfully silly” wrote Rowena McIntosh in The List review.

She signed my sketch at the Leicester Square theatre as part of her Edfringe foreplay.