Shane Torres to Make Edinburgh Fringe Debut With SKINNED KNEES

US comedian Shane Torres will make his debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Skinned Knees, a new hour about family, grief, masculinity and the emotions that come with stepping up to hold everything together when everyone else is gone.

At its heart, the show is about family: how it shapes you, how you react when the foundations shift and what happens when you are left trying to work out who you are on your own. Torres reflects on how his parents' lives (and deaths) impacted him. His father's life was shaped by chronic financial instability, at times leaving him effectively homeless. Torres recalls his mother's final month in a comatose state following emergency surgery before she passed away, and the exhaustion that comes from living inside that sustained emotional uncertainty.

With an easy Southern charm and a storyteller's sensibility, Torres builds sharp, deeply relatable stand-up from the details of his own life. His deliberate pacing and deceptively conversational delivery allow stories to unfold gradually, with even the heavier material feeling inviting rather than self-serious, before landing punchlines with unexpected turns that balance vulnerability with humour. He approaches this hour the way he approaches everything: honest, funny and with nothing to prove.

Running throughout the show is Torres' own relationship to masculinity and the world he grew up in. Raised around a more traditional version of manhood, he reflects on feeling softer, more emotionally open and slightly out of step with the environment he came from. Following his mother's death, and the role she played in helping raise his nephew, the show becomes a reflection on what happens when the emotional centre of a family disappears, and how men learn to become decent, caring people when the examples around them feel incomplete.

A homage to the environment he grew up in, the title Skinned Knees speaks to Torres' upbringing: pain was survivable, but it was also yours to deal with. If you fell, you got back up on your own and there were no kisses on your forehead. With the same clear-eyed approach, Torres finds humour and heart in stories that feel deeply personal, yet tap into universal human emotions, adding a layer of relatability as he balances confession with comedy.

Grounded, honest and relentlessly funny, Skinned Knees is a comedy about family, loss and trying to work out where home really is once the emotional landscape of your life has fundamentally changed.

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