Comedy

Every August the beautiful city of Edinburgh opens its arms and welcomes the world’s lovers of high art and low-brow filth. For comedy lovers, this means hundreds of opportunities to sit in small venues that could double up as saunas, feeling more like refugees packed into the back of a lorry than an audience. Why do hundreds of thousands head north of the border for this marathon of mirth? Well, because every now and then, in the strangest places, you discover a gem – someone you didn’t know before, an hour of such sublime comedy that it seems to illuminate the world a little bit and makes your own sad life seem positively joyous compared to the sufferings of the man or woman in front of you.
Feature continues

At the Stand Comedy Club, I was fortunate enough to have such an experience while watching Jason Cook’s show, ‘My Confessions’. Tired of playing hen parties and stag dos on the circuit where he can only do a series of knob gags or fart jokes, he yearned to talk about something real, something honest, something that actually meant something to him. So he threw out the toilet humour and chav-pleasing gags, and wrote this wonderfully crafted, sometimes brutally truthful piece of comedy delight.

The format isn’t groundbreaking, it’s simple but perfect for the job: ten confessions, each one more personal and moving than the last. Starting with ‘My Girlfriend Cuts My Hair’ – explaining his somewhat peculiar bob – he moves to the range of pranks he plays on his friends when he should be writing material for his set. As he begins to talk about his OCD, the mood changes and while he never fails to make you laugh in every section, the audience feel the chill of knowing they are really watching someone who wants to get some things off his chest. Many comedians plunder their darker inner thoughts or guilt-ridden past, but Cook makes you forget this is a performance. By the time we get to confessions nine and ten, where he discusses his father’s stroke and his guilt about the feelings this brought up, everyone in the room is sniffing and snivelling, and several grown men are crying – not me obviously, I’m far too butch for that, I just have something in my eye. Ultimately, Cook brings the set around to being a life-enhancing message that is never sickly sweet or disingenuous.

This was one of the funniest and most touching shows I’ve seen in a long time. Which is just as well, because it made up for the hours stolen from my life by having to sit through some of the drivel I’ve had to endure with other tortured audience members, looking down at our watches, wondering if time has actually slowed down. No names, but you know who you are and I want those hours back!

Other acts rising from the mire of mediocrity to swim in the clean air of success include Russell Kane with his excellent show, ‘Easy Cliché and Tired Stereotype’, which combines the comedian’s hyperactive, frenetic, ranting stand-up with some wonderfully observed, absurd sketches.

Andrew Lawrence spews forth evil bile from every orifice in ‘Social Leprosy for Beginners and Improvers’ – a crash course in how to become a social leper. And why would you want to do that? Because, as he explains, ‘people are hard to avoid – especially the cunty ones.’ He hates everyone and everything, and with lightning speed rattles out suggested ways to alienate everyone from every stratum of society, from ‘the Essex chimps who move in next door’ to ‘the Home Counties cousin-fuckers’. Watching him is a bit like watching a monkey wanking at the zoo: you want to turn your eyes away but you just can’t.

At the other end of the scale, Siobhan Rhodes-Johnson’s show, ‘Bridget Christie – The Court of King Charles’, is one of the loveliest pieces of whimsical character comedy you could ever wish to see. It tells the story of a woman obsessed by Charles II, so obsessed that she dresses like him all the time and wants to change her name by deed poll to King Charles II but is told she can only have Mrs King Charles II.

Re-enacting Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament by giving the audience party-poppers is a minor stroke of genius. Performed in a cave complete with dripping stalactites, this was living proof that no matter how hot and sweaty or cold and damp the venue, real class will always shine through. And that is why Edinburgh is such a special festival.

For ticket information see www.edfringe.com