By the time you read this, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival will be done and dusted. All the hours of laughter created will be nothing but an echo of humour past. Hearts will have been broken, tears shed, money lost and a new King or Queen of Comedy will have been crowned by the if.comedy awards panel. It’s been a strange year, with many of the better known, more well-established acts not really bringing a lot
to the table.
Some have looked weary and quite frankly unprepared. Perhaps we don’t need to see all the same old faces up here every year, spouting out the same old nonsense. I’m convinced that a lot of them would actually benefit from only coming up here every other year, giving themselves enough time to recoup and regroup. It would also mean that comics might possibly come up with something meaningful to talk about rather than simply crafting shows off the back of a pathetically flimsy premise, simply because ‘well, you know, it’s got to have a theme, hasn’t it?’.
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What has surprised me is the noticeable lack of political humour at the Fringe. I have sat through shows about: people with pet fetishes, time travel, advertising jargon, coming to terms with growing up, loneliness, geeky attachment to flats we’ve lived in and a celebration of laziness. But what I’ve heard very little about is: the looming recession, impending environmental disasters, the ever-increasing erosion of our civil liberties, knife crime and the ongoing disenfranchisement of Britain’s young people, the potential war with Iran, worldwide food shortages or the astronomical rise in oil prices and the possibility of a collapse of the global economy.
It could be argued that none of these subjects is a particularly strong subjects for comedy, but tell that to Mark Thomas, Mark Steel, Jeremy or Bill Hicks – all right, you’d need a ouija board to tell Bill, but you get the idea.
I’m not suggesting that suddenly every comic should climb up on a soapbox and tackle the major issues of today; I just find it slightly disappointing that there doesn’t seem to be a new wave of young comics prepared to look outside of their middle-class comedy bubbles of whimsy to actually say something relevant about the wider world. There are of course the odd, fine, notable exceptions such as Andy Zaltzman or Ivor Dembina, but they are few and far between and they’ve been ploughing this fertile furrow for years.
What is perhaps more disturbing is that while I only heard one comedian mention the words ‘credit crunch’ I lost count of how many threw in the now seemingly obligatory rape joke or reference. ‘Rapey’ is apparently this year’s watchword. Casual racism has also made a strong comeback, with countless comedians happy to imitate Asian or African accents, re-asserting various unpleasant stereotypes but in an ‘ironic’ way. Get it. So that’s all right then.
Even the more intelligent comedians seem happier to deal with philosophical debates around the existence of God, all-hailing their poster-boy, Richard Dawkins, rather than attacking the pressing issues of the real world head on. Don’t get me wrong – I’m as happy as anyone to jump on the atheist bandwagon – but for me what’s important is not so much the actual ontological argument, but the reasons why it’s so important that we should be tackling religious fanatics at this particular point in history.
But enough of what I haven’t seen that I would have liked to; let’s move on to the things I have seen that I did like. The Welsh old grouch, Rhod Gilbert has had a brilliant year with ‘Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie’. After a slightly disappointing show last year, Gilbert has come back with a fantastically energetic piece. Following his foray into the real world, he attempts to live for three months without the help of his overactive imagination and finds himself immersed in the boredom of everyday life until it drives him slightly mad.
This year has been a good year for comedians of the fairer sex. Both Sarah Millican with ‘Sarah Millican’s Not Nice’ and Pippa Evans with ‘Pippa Evans and Other Lonely People’ have made a huge impact with their Edinburgh debuts. Millican, a wonderfully bitter, high-voiced Geordie, delivers an excellent straight stand-up set, examining the measures she has had to take to rebuild her life after a disastrous marriage. Evans, meanwhile, has proved herself to be the finest female character comic around, with her impressive array of socially awkward outsiders. Her show is exquisitely written and her singing voice is far more worthy of the West End than the converted bunker she’s been performing in.
This funniest thing I’ve seen, though, throughout my whole time up here happened in a Lloyds TSB bank. While waiting to pay in a cheque, I watched the dear, sweet, old Eastern European lady in front of me pay in some cash. ‘Will that be all, or can I help you with anything else at all today?’ the pleasant young man behind the glass offered after dealing with her transaction. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I like sex. But I’m a little busy right now. Perhaps I could come back later and we could do the sex then. Or maybe tomorrow.’ She winked at him and then headed off, leaving the assistant stunned and speechless. Perfect. Six stars.
1 comment
Excellent opinion piece.
I think political humour has a more limited appeal than whimsy, escapist comedy.