Fringe Benefits - Day 3

Previously on my Edinburgh Blog: We met Paul Merton! Then we Met Suggs! We briefly met a man who is pictured below (or maybe not. No he is, I just wanted to build some suspense). I got picked on for not taking the fact actress, Sue Johnstone had to take a month off work seriously enough. I had a lot of Buckybombs and danced till it, quite seriously, hurt.

Day 3 - My Elevator Days - Pleasance Upstairs - 12:30PM

Before 1PM is considered early at the Edinburgh Fringe Festvial. It's like a ghost town. The mornings are the times when the locals come out and do their shopping safe from flyers. The pleasance was deserted apart from the people who worked there and the twelve people who had come to see this play. It was a one man play and for a while, me and Ben sat outside worrying that the audience might be double the size of the cast. It was not the size of crowd this man deserved. Partly because of the time of day and also competing with all the comedy names that surrounded him at the pleasance. But it was a very good play and he was a very good actor. The play is a monologue about a man who became friends with an elevator (sounds weird, but it makes sense in the show. Basically he would talk to the elevator and be comforted by the sound of it, but it has much more to do with this guy who spent his entire - pretty lonely - life on the sixth floor of a tower block). It's pretty clever, it has a lot of witty lines, often revolving around the fourth-wall-breaking that he establishes in the opening line that he is talking to us, the audience. He asks us questions from time to time, none of which we're meant to answer. I wonder if he really is talking to us or just talking to himself coz he's a bit lonely and mad. I also wonder if that really matters. Or if it's worth telling you an opinion of it, since you haven't seen the play probably...I think I'm turning into him a bit now. Look out for a production of it, you'll like it. Plus at the end he brings on a cute dog as part of the punchline to a very funny, yet character defining, story.

The Early Edition - E4 Udderbelly - 2PM

Today was going to be busy day. We had a lot of shows to pack in and about 20minutes to hot-foot it from the Pleasance to the big, upside-down, purple cow in Bistro Square. The Early Edition is a live spin-off from the TV series The Late Edition. No, didn't expect you to have heard of it, it was dropped from BBC4's schedules because it had no viewers, because they never bothered to tell anyone it was on. It was hosted by one of my favourite comedians and even I didn't discover it until halfway through the last series. It was basically The Daily Show (don't tell me you don't watch that one either. 10:30 Comedy Central Extra. Er...Daily), but British.

The Early Edition is another Edinburgh show I've been back to see several times. It's hosted by Marcus Brigstocke, who charmingly signed my ticket when I saw the show a few years ago. And I still have, kept safe, the ticket signed by Rcus Stocke, and if the steward who ripped the stub off on the way in still has it, please get in touch. Originally this show was really the only comedy show you could/should go and see in the morning, but as I say, the streets aren't exactly packed in the am. The format is simple. Rcus Stoke and Andre Vincent and guests, read the daily newspapers "and the Mail as well" and tell us what's in them. Humour ensues. To be honest, the humour was kind of subdued that afternoon. I think partly because it was still relatively early for the fringe hardcore and neither of the guests were that famous. Carrie Quinlin (who writes on The Now Show) was one of them and although a popular guest on that show, I'm not a big fan of her. Kevin Day (who writes for Buzzcocks, Stand Up For The Week and Strictly) was the other guest. He was pretty funny, but not a star name, and evidently someone who is better at writing jokes than he is at performing them. All of this meant that the big upside-down cow we were in was half empty. Not a great atmosphere, but still a very funny show, mostly because of Prince Harry's involvement in the weeks news.
It ended on a bit of a dull note with Rcus opening it up to audience questions and someone asking where they got the bottled water they were drinking from and how much they paid for it. It's hard to tell if he was offering to do business with them ("I could have got that much cheaper for you") or thought that it would lead to genuine showstopping satire. It didn't really.

Juana In A Million - 10 Dome - 4:15PM

A bit of a gap between shows let me, finally, get some breakfast. The most sugary banoffee waffle I have ever had. If I, many years in the future, suffer from diabetes, I'm pretty sure doctors will trace it back to that waffle shed in Edinburgh. It was nice though. Next up was Juana In A Million at the Pleasance Dome which as far as I can make out is the University Of Edinburgh's SU the rest of the year. The 10 Dome is a claustrophobic room upstairs in the venue. It consisted of about 10 rows of seating (average, or perhaps above average for fringe venues) and a stage that was the size of a cupboard, and I'm not talking walk-in here, I'm talking the little ones you get in the side of some desks. It was another one person play, although a guy in the corner provided additional voices and music. I always like live music in a play. It's adds quite a bit of atmosphere and specialness (you can use a better word if you like) to a live performance.

Juana In A Million is based on the true stories of immigrants into the UK and follows the story of Juana, a Mexican immigrant who moves to the UK for a better life with, it's no spoiler to say, mixed results: mostly it's not good for her though. We were undecided about whether we wanted to go to this show. It was a must see according to The Stage on the one hand, on the other hand, it has that title. It turned out to be very good. These kind of plays can be rather uncomfortable to watch, I think that's the point, and this one certainly was at some points, Vicky Araico Casas is a really terrific actress which doesn't make it any more easy going. She flips from one character to another very smoothly and uses little ticks and grand movements to signal who she is. But there's also a lot of darkly funny bits in this, that prevent it from slipping too far into sob story territory. There are stories about an incredibly smelly woman who shares a bed with Juana in the home they're forced to live in, and Casas plays the chef in the restaurant where she works, who is constantly making sexual remarks and asking her to suck his dick, with a bit of dark humour, that gets less funny the more it's repeated - totally intentionally. All of this makes the really proper dark plot twists, feel much more horrible. There's a fair amount of dance drama and physical theatre in this, as a rule those are things I don't like, and it's not much different here. I think having it rammed down my throat too much doing A Level drama might be the cause, or it might be that I just prefer natural and real things. That let this down in my eyes - though it's obviously a matter of personal taste - and meant that this morning's much more natural performance of a man who was best friends with a lift remains my favourite, because it's er...more realistic, oddly.

Greg Proops - Elegance - 6:15PM

While buying tickets to this show we bumped into Kristen Schaal from Flight Of The Conchords and took our celebrity stalking trip to new levels by stalking a celebrity famous for playing a celebrity stalker. As a result of this meta-stalk, I can confirm that that is her real voice and that she is very charming and seemed genuinely impressed that we liked Madness because she thought we were too young for them. Oh yeah, we were telling everyone that we'd met Suggs, even other famous people we met. We didn't exactly phrase it "Yeah, you're good but..."

Greg Proops Watch: Sighting #2. This has to be the best looking of all the venues we visited. It was a giant big top with lots of elegant Victorian-circus feeling decor. But the downside is that it was a tent. A tent next to another tent where Glastonbury from the 70s seemed to be going on. This visibly annoyed and distracted Greg Proops throughout as the noise from their show sometimes drowned out his. It impacted on the reaction some of his best jokes should have got, because he's a really good comedian with a really good comic style, but was clearly being put off his stride a lot. It didn't make the show not funny, nothing could make Proops not funny, but it didn't exactly do him any favours. Still the crowd enjoyed it. The stage also had three sides but everyone was sat on one side, which made it less initimate than many Edinburgh shows, especially as Proops is one to wander about the stage while he speaks and that meant there were times when he was obscured by a pillar holding up the tent roof. To summarise, a very good comedian - someone who I knew from improv but had never seen doing stand-up before and was very impressed and amused by what I saw - but let down by a rather too shitty venue.

Andrew Maxwell: That's The Spirit - George Square Theatre - 9:05PM

This show was in a much better venue, and for once it was a venue that's probably a venue all year around rather than someone's bedroom, a gym or a storage cupboard. Our various meetings with celebrities led to an over-inflated ego and sense of our own fame and importance, and this, together with the poor signposting in the venue led to us attempting to accidentally walk in via the backstage door. The man we were following had to direct us the right way, "Thank you Mark Watson," we said (for it was he) and made some jokes at him, as if to prove we could have used the comedian's entrance if we'd wanted to, he laughed and Ben got the last laugh, which we agree is nice, because the comedian wasn't desperate to get the funny line in.

The show itself consisted of a lot of stories about conspiracy theories - Andrew had recently filmed a BBC documentary on the subject - and crazy redneck Americans. It was interesting and funny. A guy from the audience shouted out to confirm he was an SNP supporter but then fell silent and struggled to describe any of their policies under the polite questioning of Andrew Maxwell, it sort of played to my stereotypes of anyone supporting a party that ends in NP. To be honest, I don't remember much of this show, when you've seen a lot of Edinburgh shows you start to lose track of them and the tiredness from the night before was kicking in at this stage in the evening. You also start to notice it feel weird to laugh. A few days after I arrived back in WGC, I developed a sore throat which I put down to comedians being too hilarious. The beginning of that sore throat was felt during this gig, and that made me a bit self-concious about my stupid loud laugh and feel guilty about the pain I must put you in when you are in my presence for a long time. (HA! The last bit is ironic self-ego-inflating shite, don't worry about it).

Monkey Toast: The Improvised Chat Show - 10 Dome - 11:05PM

Determined not to let my declining health or tiredness stop me laughing, we decided to return to our claustrophobic room in the SU for some late night comedy. I wasn't sure what to expect of this show, but it's format was different and quite good. The host, David Shore, interviewed a couple of guests who were other comics performing at the fringe and then a team of six improvisers and a pianist would improvise scenes based around the guest's life stories. The start of this show didn't fill me with confidence. Everyone jumped, skipped and ran onto the stage waving. I hate that kind of thing. Boundless enthusiasm is not a particularly British style and it feels a little bit too much like they're trying to force us to be happy and shouting "We're fun!" aggressively in your face. But the show is Canadian in origin and so is probably very American influenced and that's the kind of thing they like isn't it? All too often American comedy acts zany because they mistake zany for actually humourous.

The first guest was Naz Osmanoglu. I'd seen him before as part of the sketch group Wittank and he was a gift to the improvisers, on account of being a half-Turkish prince who is 19th in line to the Turkish throne living his life in exile. This was probably not what the improvisers normally had to work from, but they came up with some brilliant stuff for him. We were sat in the front row, left hand corner, right in front of the desk where David and Naz (please, call him Mr Osmanoglu) were sat doing the interview so during the improvised scenes I was always distracted by watching how Osmanoglu (the G is silent) was reacting to them.

About half way through the show Naz left to a round of applause and was replaced by the next guest. Greg Proops Watch: Sighting #4. But "hark, what is this treachery?!" I hear you cry, "you were only on two sightings of Proops. What happened?" Let me take you far, far back in the sands of time to half an hour previously. While queuing for the show we saw Proops in the wild. The not-usually-a-venue nature of many of these places forces the comedian to walk past the queue to get backstage. Proops was in a hurry, but polite and friendly and shook our hands. I had planned not to wash them again from that moment on, but that would require me to never use the toilet again and I couldn't go back through the airport struggling to walk because my anus was full.

Proops was, as ever, an informed and opinionated guest but the best story, that stood out for us, was his recollections of a terrible venue he'd performed in earlier than night and a tantrum, not to mention a chair, he'd thrown in rage when he'd come off stage. It was great to get hear some follow up to Proops sighting #2 and the improvisation that the improsarios (I was getting bored of saying improvisers) did recreating his tantrum made him cry with laughter. Fun was had by all, especially Mr Proops, who happened to plug his podcast, that he would be recording in the Soho theatre shortly after we returned home. As a footnote to this I want to point out Proops Sighting #5, which at this point is the most recent, where he walked around the audience and introduced himself to everyone before performing his podcast and, once again, shook my hand and we told him it was the fourth time we'd seen him and reminded him of his tantrum. He gave us a shout out. Listen to the episode in question, called Gates, here: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-smartest-man-in-the-world/id401055309?mt=2

After Hours Comedy - Ace Dome - 00:40AM

Another room in the SU, this time with a bar in it: lovely. A late night comedy show promising four of the best acts from the fringe, all doing around 25 minutes of material. I say late night, but obviously it's more early morning. The ticket respected that fact by listing the date of the show as ""Thu 23 August 2012."" I approve of it's use of inverted commas as a way of saying "because it's simpler and we all know what it means we're going to act like it's still Thursday because you haven't been to bed yet" but pleasing the pedants as well. If only we could all pay more attention to the needs of pedents and not needlessly do childish things to whind them up.

Prior to the show, now ever ready to spot a celebrity, we see a boy without tape on his face. In the show the  compare is one of those young comedians who's been on things, but to be honest, I didn't take much of a liking to him and failed to do him the respect of remembering his name in this whole list of comedians. Sorry. Also, earlier in this multi-part blog I said how privleged I felt to be included in comedians shows or "picked on" as people say. The reason I sort of prefer picked on is because the comic has chosen to have a dialogue with you and engage in a bit of banter. It's they're show, they're in charge. Not that I'm against heckling - in fact the last time I was in this venue, I saw the single worst comedy night I have seen, as act after act got heckled off the stage. At one point a double act were going so badly that there was a queue to leave the room, when the straight man from the double act jumped off the stage and joined the back of the queue, instantly reversing the roles of his double act and becoming the funniest part of the night.

I digress (a lot you may have noticed), but my point is there was some knob in the front row who after a brief chat with the compare suddenly believed himself to be the star of the show and would shout out intermittently throughout the gig and attempted at one point to follow the compare onto the stage. He was annoying, but I guess you come to expect that at a late night comedy gig, especially in Edinburgh, everyone's a bit drunk. To his credit, the compare who I didn't like, handled the guy well.

First act on Marcel Lucont. A Frenchman. Well, in actual fact probably an Englishman playing a Frenchman doing jokes about the English. It sounds like a fairly average premise, but thrown in are some poetry, smugness and the fact that - by his own admission - this was his fourth show and he was a little bit drunk. Not surprising as he was accompanied at all times on stage by a glass of red (naturally). I took a massive liking to this character from the off. Very funny character comedy, and I do enjoy discovering new acts at Edinburgh.

Next up was Edinburgh Fringe favourite, award-winner The Boy With Tape On His Face. Being from the past, I love silent comedy, and this guy does silent comedy with audience participation very well. To say too much about his act ruins it slightly for people who might go and see it. But the general act is that he gets people on stage, gives them some props and makes them do something funny. It's all very friendly and I was genuinely a little bit shocked that somebody in the audience refused it. I don't know how - I really must learn his secret - but The Boy manages to create an atmosphere where it's actually not so bad to be called up to the stage. Maybe it's a mix of light-hearted silliness or the fact that you are the centre of attention while you're there. The only awkward bit is when he forced two random strangers to kiss on the stage, but even so, I think they both enjoyed it. Or maybe it was when he repeatedly got the heckler from earlier up only to send him away again immediately. Finally, he got the guy up to perform. He did one of his routines that he's done on TV, where he blindfolds the guy and then puts on some glasses with a basketball hoop and a ball on some string on and nods his head trying to get the ball in the hoop, all the while the blindfolded guy assumes we're laughing at him, but doesn't know why. Simple. Brilliant. Then the guy made some comment into the microphone and the boy seemed very annoyed. This prick had to have the last word, despite just being made the star of the show. In a word, wanker.


Next time: Imaginary friends, Doctor Who and that (relatively) shocking end to our trip.