Gina Harms

She steps up to the microphone with the eager, slightly breathless cadence of someone bursting into a bathroom stall to tell her best friend a terrible secret. The rhythm is built on total sincerity. Harms will lay out an absurd choice, like buying a plane ticket to chase a guy she talked to for three days, not as a punchline waiting to drop, but as a completely rational reaction to a romantic hunch. When a room hesitates over just how bad an idea sounds, she does not pull back. She doubles down with a bright, wide-eyed nod, letting the crowd catch up to the disaster before pulling out actual teenage diary entries to prove the habit started decades ago.

Harms operates out of Vancouver’s indie circuit, sticking close to alternative rooms and fringe venues like Little Mountain Gallery where conversational, long-form storytelling gets room to breathe.

Her hour, Crying In Public, hinges on her refusal to play the victim of her own bad choices. Instead, she leans into the comedy of self-delusion, skewering how watching too many teen dramas made ordinary heartbreak feel cinematic. When she gets tangled in the chronology of a long story, the joke rate can dip while she manages the plot. Her warmth keeps the room on her side, though, and the payoff lands the moment she punctures her own romantic fantasy with a blunt dose of reality.

Raised in Kamloops, British Columbia, Harms trained in acting before ditching scripts for the club circuit, an origin that shows in how completely she commits to every humiliating reenactment on stage.